THE EXILED - MANKIND'S ONLY ALTERNATIVEhttp://exiledonline.com
All the news not fit to print: Gary Brecher the War Nerd, Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Eileen Jones and the rest of Team eXiledSat, 18 Jul 2015 05:08:38 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2Sadness of Being Number One: Dr. Limonov’s Megalomaniacal Complaintshttp://exiledonline.com/sadness-of-being-number-one-dr-limonovs-megalomaniacal-complaints/
http://exiledonline.com/sadness-of-being-number-one-dr-limonovs-megalomaniacal-complaints/#commentsSun, 24 May 2015 19:35:37 +0000Mark Ameshttp://exiledonline.com/?p=61867

This article was first published in The eXile on February 10, 2000

So-called “Russian Liberal Intelligentsia” long time ago have excluded me from the world of literature. They are behaving like I am not existing, maybe dead, maybe never born. It is interesting phenomenon, the only one other such case that I know is case of Jean Genet.

When I established myself in Paris in 1980 I was surprised by total absence of that great writer from social and literary life of France. He wasn’t mentioned in newspapers, no literary critic would write an essay about Genet. I asked my editors and my friends about Genet, is he alive, is he in Paris? Nobody could say with precision that he is living in Paris. They say that according to some rumors he lives in some cheap hotel, populated by Arabs, somewhere near Montmartre. But I never succeeded in tracing him. Then he died, and suddenly every newspaper been talking about Genet, even bureaucrats of Ministry of Culture started to worship him. I remember that I wrote his obituary for French communist newspaper “Revolution”. Foreigner, I wrote about foreigner amongst the French. Later I understand that all fault of Genet was that he was not politically correct. He supported “Black Panthers”, he supported struggle of Palestinian people for its own state, and so on… He rejected silly mode of thinking of his time. So he was living like in quarantine barrack, like a dangerously sick person, isolated from the world.

I also live in my country isolated, as I am dangerously ill person. If I am mentioned in some context by journalist he always excusing himself adding something like, “Of course now Limonov turned bad, but…” My colleagues-writers are looking through me. Because I am presumably dead or never born, it’s easy for them to get their stupid “Booker” and “anti-Booker” prizes, to quarrel at literary cocktails who is number one in Russian literature, to seduce girls… [But it also well known, that the best girls are fucking bandits, businessmen and politicians. So, here I am superior to my colleagues-writers, because as a head of political organization I have better and younger girls than they have.]

It was only one man whose literary talent I have measured as big one, although different from mine and less original than mine: Joseph Brodsky. But Brodsky have died shortly after his readers died. His readers, that quiet Soviet men, have died somewhere between 1986 and 1991. So Brodsky wasn’t needed anymore, that is why he died. I feel little bit lonely because of his absence, I even wrote a poem about how am I lonely without him in the world. It goes like that:

Died even Brodsky, my antipode and rival.

Nobody is here to look at me.

I left alone.

So I am bored without Brodsky. As a politician I compete with Barkashov, but I guess I am winning that competition. In 1992 I have envied Zhirinovsky, but during these eight years Zhirinovsky steadily getting smaller and commonplacer (sorry for such English), that jerk is licking ass to the government. So Mark Ames wasn’t right when he wrote four or five years ago that Zhirinovsky is punkier than Limonov. No way, Mark, I am leader of eight thousand strong young revolutionary party, while Zhirinovsky is leader of 17 corrupted pot-bellied deputies of State Duma. My faction had it places in prisons, for the moment, 18 members of National Bolsheviks Party are behind the bars. Zhirinovsky is a jerk, point. I hope you now will agreed with me, Mark?

I always wanted to be a number one. But now, when I am number one, probably most interesting personality and of course most interesting writer of my country, now approaching 57, I am rather sad. Because I need the rival eyes watching me. Brodsky was a Master, we lived through complicated love-hate relationships. He didn’t like my book “It’s Me, Eddie“, but envied pages of “Diary of a Loser“. I envied his “Ode to Zhukov”. When in 1998 my “Anatomy of a Hero” came out I physically needed Brodsky to read that book. Or somebody like Brodsky. But he was lying in the soil of city of Venice. Why you left me, Joseph? By the way, we both wrote about Venice, my book, “The Death of Modern Heroes” is better than his classical delights about that rotten city-museum. He wasn’t very bright, Joseph, but he was a Master, he could appreciate, he could feel. It is rather rare occurrence, The Master, so who the fuck will read me?

Though, Korchinski will read me! Ukrainian poet, adventurer and soldier, Dmitro Korchinski was founder and leader of Ukrainian Nationalist Organization UNA-UNSO in 1990-97. I met him in April 1999 in Moscow, then last October some comrades from Kiev have sended me his book “Man in the Crowd“. Book is about wars and his party struggle, that is some philosophical reflections in it. I read it with a great pleasure, and understanding. Because it is a book of a free man, cynical and beautiful. Look, what he wrote about Transdniestr: “All of us, organizers and participants of that war made a great mistake. It was necessary to riot regions of Odessa and Moldova, to announce that Transdniestr is a land and refuge of Revolution. To our sorrow was materialized banal separatist idea.”

I agree with him. I took part in a war in Transdniestr. Sometimes he and I were on other sides of a same war as in Abkhazia. I participated in the battle for Shromi, where Ukrainians were fighting on Georgian side and Russians and Chechens on Abkhazian side. My enemy Korchinski will read me. If he will survive, because he is wanted by the Ukrainian authorities. Me also, from March 1996.

The Medvedeva woman was impossible as everybody knows. She was prone to bouts of drunkedness, fits of hysteria, you name it. She was awkward, did not know how to fit into society, she was ready to love or hate passionately at the drop of a hat; she was, as it is well documented, an exhibitionist. She was also a good singer, a lonely girl, a dedicated artist, a beautiful babe, and, binges notwithstanding, a faithful woman in her own weird way. I got married to her in 1985 so she could stay in Paris and live with whoever she wanted, and although I did not put one shred of faith in this “wedding” apart from the bond of friendship (we never slept together), she did, as it turned out.

I found out about her death while on an extended stay in New York.

As one famous French writer once said: it is not the first time I spill ink on the grave of a friend. But this time it feels especially painful. And I never thought it would because the last time I saw her in old M she was so competitive and infatuated with her own so-called “superstardom” I decided not to call her again. And I didn’t.

In those days I had not yet learned to appreciate the beauty and the sheer energy of a Russian slut. The Medvedeva woman was all that and also the sad and sexy girl without a father you can meet at every street corner in old Russia, when they haven’t been all bent out shape yet. Several men have been wooed and bewitched by this unlikely blend in her, and understandably so. I was not one of them, she was more like a particularly unnerving ballbreaking sister to me. So I’ll tell a few stories about her, because I feel the need, and in hell, she’ll thank me for that, she just loved publicity.

She had to get married to get the residency in “Old Europe” (term coined by D Rumsfeld). My Russian girlfriend at the time said I was crazy not to ask her for a little money. Talk about feminine solidarity. I just answered I was doing it as a favor to a friend, Edward Limonov, her lover. So we went to the “prefecture” dressed to the nines, on a cold winter morning to make arrangements for the wedding. Which means, basically, visiting a bunch of cops. The Medvedeva woman showed up in her long grey riding coat, she was wearing a shapka, and she was utterly made up. She had the right kind of dress not too short, not too long, and the right kind of smile teasing just enough. She was stunning. So anyway while all around they were treating Africans and the female janitors who came in for the same purpose like dirt, that old cop was like a grand-father to us, wooing and cooing, “Please let me hear her speaking French…” You have to understand this was in the early 1980s, in the days of USSR, when they saw a Russian beauty once in a blue moon.

Right up until the wedding she kept the serious mood. The maire of the ninth arrondissement issued a stern warning to us that “marriage was a serious thing.” I suppose he was suspicious. At the party thrown afterwards Limonov and my girlfriend threw a fit cause The Medvedeva woman had put on tight hot pants and gotten so drunk she sat on my lap, at some point. Well I fled.

Well after that, she reminded me that we were tied up somehow. She called one morning, crying. At that time she was living by herself in a studio off la Rue St-Denis in the red light district. She had come home really drunk late the night before, dropped a damn lead heater (they don’t make em no more) weighing about a ton and half on her damn foot. She was so shit-faced she had fallen asleep. And then woken up the next day with a pain that was ridiculous. I went there, and as soon as I came in she started screaming.

Then I had to call a cab and go down the stairs with her yelling at each step. Then the nurses at the hospital started to hate her right away because she was screaming bloody murder as soon as she saw their white starched uniforms. I called Limonov so he ‘d take charge. Shit, at that point, I needed a drink.

However, there was another side to that woman, that’s often overlooked because of the stunts. Later that year, she went back to live with her man – and he really was her man – lost weight, rehearsed with a band, stopped drinking, and wrote a couple of books in a row, not to mention poems and songs. Thin, and lithe, and milder, she was an incredibly graceful woman.

That marriage was hovering over us though, no matter how hard I denied any truth to it. Then comes my favorite story about The Medvedeva woman. Several times in a row, when I was visiting them, she stared at me like she’d seen a ghost. And indeed she had seen one. In those days, she used to say I bore an unbelievable resemblance to her brother. It made sense because, we shared the cheekbones, the light eyes, and the fat lips. In those days she ‘d tell that same story all the time. How, during her childhood, she and her mother visited that damn brother who served in the Red Army, with a basket full of sausage and guess what, vodka.

They would take the train to the middle of nowhere around Leningrad, stop at a deserted station, and walk in the snow. They’d always stopped under the same tree and wait for him to come down the hill, a dark figure aginst the white fields. He would lift the little devotchka, and she was proud of being the sister of this strong soldier. Then he’d eat the sausage and drink the booze, before turning back to walk up the hill and disappear. They would always wait until he was out of sight. And then walk back to the lonely station.

Years later, when I saw The Medvedeva woman again in Moscow I reminded her this whole romance about her brother. She dismissed it with a disgusted wave of the hand.

“He’s a hopeless drunk now,” she said.

And I liked that unlikely blend in her : the lost soul and the disabused bitch. Made for a hell of a woman.

Natalia Medvedova, singer, author and former wife of Edward Limonov, died on February 4th of heart failure at the age of 44.

This article was originally published in The eXile on February 20, 2003.

For the past year-and-a-half I’ve been covering the “Surveillance Valley” beat for Pando Daily — investigating the for-profit surveillance business that powers Silicon Valley and the way this technology is increasingly being used to monitor and control our lives.

My reporting has taken me deep inside the modern surveillance state — a place where where giant tech companies work hand in hand with the military-industrial complex and make billions by spying on our private lives.

I have received death threats for my reporting. But I have also received an amazing amount of encouragement and support from readers all over the world.

The feedback showed just how worried we all are at the growing, unchecked economic and political power of Silicon Valley — and how little any of us really know about what’s going on in the boardrooms and faceless server warehouse-farms that power big tech. This response only strengthened my conviction that Silicon Valley’s reliance on surveillance to expand and maintain its power is an issue that needed to be explored deeper and at greater length.

My reporting for Pando was just the first step. Everything is so interconnected — and the big picture, the history and context is so vital to understanding at how we arrived at this dystopian version of Silicon Valley — I realized that in order to do the subject justice and tell the story properly required more time and a bigger frame of reference that’s encumbered by news cycles and constant deadlines. Put simply: I needed to write a Surveillance Valley book.

It’ll tell the story of how Silicon Valley turned the Internet into the greatest surveillance apparatus in the history of mankind — an apparatus that’s increasingly being used not just to monitor us, but to control our lives.

For reasons I’ll explain below, I’m self-publishing the book, using Kickstarter to cover the costs of research and publication. That Kickstarter launches today.

Since the start of the Internet revolution, we’ve been told that we are witnessing the dawn of a new and liberating technology — a technology that will decentralize power, topple entrenched bureaucracies, and bring more democracy and equality to the world. But the Internet did the exact opposite. It birthed massive global corporations, helped concentrate wealth and power, and expanded the reach of the U.S. National Security State.

How did a technology that supposedly held so such democratic promise so quickly devolve into the dystopian reality we see today? How is all this concentrated power affecting our democratic society? Where is it going? And where will it end?

These are some of the overarching questions that I will address in Surveillance Valley.

Why Kickstarter and not a traditional publisher?

Over the past few months, I’ve talked to several publishers about the book. All of them expressed great interest and excitement about the project, only to suddenly get cold feet. Their reaction wasn’t that surprising, considering that the book will take on not just one or two tech giants, but the whole establishment — Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter — companies that these book publishers depend on more and more each day for their basic survival.

The more I thought about the book project and discussed it with my colleagues, the more I more I became convinced that given the subject matter and the powerful corporate interests its taking on, Surveillance Valley should be an truly independent project — a project free of pressure for publishers, advertisers and investors.

Surveillance Valley will be an extension of my reporting for Pando Daily: an old-fashioned work of investigative non-fiction that combines my previous work with new exposés, analysis, historical research and the work of scholars and journalists — all of it stitched together in a well-written, tightly argued and immaculately sourced page-turner that will change the way people think about the Internet.

Some of the themes explored in Surveillance Valley will be familiar to readers who’ve followed my work. But the book will go much deeper and broader, exploring history and issues that I was only able address only in passing, or not all.

Surveillance Valley will be more than just a book about the Silicon Valley’s surveillance business. It will tie the issue of big tech to the bigger political and economic problems of our times: oligarchy and runaway corporate power.

We live in an age of extreme political disenfranchisement, extreme poverty and almost total control over public life by monopolistic corporate interests, a time when any kind of real democratic change seems all but impossible. It’s a bleak time, but it’s also exciting — a chance to start broad social and political movement to remake society into a community worthy of the 21st century.

The Internet, and the greater global telecommunication infrastructure, is a central part of this bigger struggle. And that makes understanding the Internet — its history, its politics, its power, where it was and where it’s going — so crucial. It’s an important discussion for us to have, but outside the work of a few great scholars like Frank Pasquale and David Golumbia it is a discussion that’s not being heard nearly enough.

I want to do my part in helping fill this void.

With your support, the book will…

Blow the lid off the Google-Military Surveillance Complex: It will investigate Google’s close relationship with US National Security State — from the DARPA grants that funded Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s PhD research to today’s multidimensional collaboration between Google and the US military-intelligence apparatus: DoD spy satellites, CIA search contracts and its aggressive expansion into every cutting-edge military tech imaginable: battlefield robots, rocket technology, Google Glass for soldiers.

Explore the Silicon Valley arms race: It will look at how other Silicon Valley companies — Amazon, eBay, Microsoft — are in a race to dominate the lucrative military and intelligence contracting market, and show how they’re explicitly aiming to become the Boeings, Lockheed-Martins and Booz Allen Hamiltons of the Internet Age.

Reveal how Silicon Valley polices our lives: There is a common misconception that no matter how much Silicon Valley companies spy on us, at least they don’t have the power to arrest and jail us. Truth is, they can and do. This book will investigate how the most progressive Internet companies — including eBay, Facebook and Google — engage in pro-active policing. For example: eBay’s massive private police alone has overseen thousands of arrests and convictions around the globe, and hands over complete criminal cases to government prosecutors “on a silver platter.”

Show what Silicon Valley knows about us and how it makes money off our privacy: Companies like Google and Facebook aggressively mine user data to compile complex and detailed dossiers, extracting personal information on our personalities, income, interests and friends. What information do these companies collect exactly? This book will explain. It will also investigate the inner workings of the Silicon Valley’s for-profit surveillance business model. What do tech companies do with all the data they collect on us? Who do they sell it to? How do they make money?

Investigate the growing political power of Silicon Valley: The Internet was supposed to decentralize power and empower the grassroots — instead it birthed massive global corporations and helped concentrate wealth and power. The book will look at big tech’s growing political and economic power, including Silicon Valley’s deepening alliance with the Koch brothers think-tank network and the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Expose U.S. Government’s funding of anti-government privacy technology: The book will explain why the Pentagon — along with the State Department and other government agencies dedicated to expanding American power abroad — funds just about every open source Internet privacy technology in use today, including the Tor Project and other tools recommended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Tell the real history of the Internet: In the popular telling, the story of the Internet is one of freewheeling creativity and plucky entrepreneurship. But there is another protagonist in this adventure: Uncle Sam. The book will explore the central role that the U.S. government and military played in driving the development of computer technology — from the Cold War, to WWII and all the way back to the 19th century. (A bit of trivia: did you know that the invention of the first computer was a direct consequence of a clause in the U.S. Constitution?)

Help protect your privacy: Silicon Valley spends enormous resources to keep us ignorant and in the dark about the industry’s invasive surveillance practices. We can’t protect ourselves from what we don’t know exists. This book will fill this information vacuum and expose what big tech companies — Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay — want to keep hidden.

]]>http://exiledonline.com/support-yasha-levine-book-surveillance-valley/feed/1Interview with Yasha Levine: “In 2013 Tor received 90% of its funding from the US government”http://exiledonline.com/interview-with-yasha-levine-in-2013-tor-received-90-of-its-funding-from-the-us-government/
http://exiledonline.com/interview-with-yasha-levine-in-2013-tor-received-90-of-its-funding-from-the-us-government/#commentsSat, 10 Jan 2015 06:14:47 +0000Yasha Levinehttp://exiledonline.com/?p=61709

Note: This is a slightly abridged English version of an interview conducted by the great Berlin-based journalist Àngel Ferrero. It was originally published in the Spanish media cooperative La Marea. You can read the full version in Spanish here. For background, read Yasha Levine’s Tor coverage here, here and here.

* * *

Àngel Ferrero: Before we begin, maybe you should briefly explain to the readers who never heard about it before what Tor is…

Yasha Levine: Tor is a tool that’s supposed to hide your identity on the Internet — making it impossible for someone to observe who you are and what you’re doing on the net. It’s easy to use. All you have to do is download an app built into a modified version of Firefox and browse the web that way. Tor has a huge following among political activists and journalists — and has been endorsed and promoted by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Tor’s supporters see it as a magical cloak that renders people invisible on net. They say that Tor is vital for political dissidents in totalitarian regimes like China and Iran, but also promote Tor as a solution to the NSA and the U.S. surveillance state.

Five months ago you wrote a controversial article about Tor. Who are the developers behind it?

There is a small core group of developers employed full time by The Tor Network, a non-profit organization set up in 2005. It is an open source project, so volunteers contribute to the development. And apparently, even the NSA periodically sends in bug fixes as well!

According to your investigation, the developers of Tor have had connections with government agencies, the NSA amongst them.

Well, it’s not just that some of the developers have ties to government agencies. The entire project was developed and continues to be actively funded by the U.S. National Security State: Pentagon, State Department, USAID and other federal government agencies that are dedicated to expanding U.S. power abroad.

The origins of Tor go back to 1995, when military scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory were tasked with developing technology that allowed intelligence and military personnel to work online undercover without fear of being unmasked by someone monitoring their Internet activity. Whether it was a undercover agent logging into his CIA.gov mail account from Syria or infiltrating a jihadist or animal rights online group — anyone looking at or sniffing the connection would immediately be able to blow their cover.

So a couple of scientists hit up on an idea called “onion routing” — a method that redirected traffic into a parallel peer-to-peer network and bounced it around randomly before sending it off to its final destination. The idea was to move it around so as to confuse and disconnect its origin and destination and make it impossible for someone to observe who you are or where you’re going on the Internet.

This research was bankrolled by the Office of Naval Research and DARPA. It was led by a team of scientists — Paul Syverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag — all of them working for the Naval Research Laboratory, sitting inside the massive Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling military base in Southeast Washington, D.C.

They built an “onion router” system that worked, but quickly realized that only technically anonymizing traffic was not enough — not if the system was being used exclusively by military and intelligence. In order to cloak spooks effectively, Tor needed to be used by a diverse group of people: activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, foreign agents, terrorists — the more diverse the group, the better the spooks could hide in the crowd in plain sight.

That’s why starting in 2004, Tor was spun off as an independent open source project and began to distance itself from its military-intelligence ties.

Most people now think of Tor is somehow hostile to the U.S. government, but in fact it continues to receive the bulk of its funds from the same military-intelligence agencies that spawned it. In 2013, Tor got over 90% of its funding from the U.S. government, with the largest grant coming from the Pentagon.

Tor is essentially a private military contractor. It’s a small contractor and operates a non-profit, but it is a government contractor nonetheless. Tor co-founder Roger Dingledine even described his work that way, telling a security conference in 2004: “I contract for the United States Government to built anonymity technology for them and deploy it.”

Former Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum also worked for Tor.

Yes, Jacob Appelbaum has been with Tor for a while, first as a volunteer and then in 2008 as a salaried developer.

Jacob is a well-known security researcher/good guy hacker. His connection to Tor and Wikileaks is very interesting.

In 2010 he was making about $100,000 a year working for Tor — the bulk of which was coming from U.S. State Department and intel-related grants. Right in the midst of that, Jacob emerged as an important Wikileaks volunteer. He used his celebrity status in the hacker world to promote the organization, helped secure Wikileaks’ servers with Tor technology and even bailed Assange out of public speaking gigs when the heat from US authorities got too hot.

That same year, Rolling Stone did a big story on Jacob Appelbaum, profiling him as a brilliant techno-anarchist rebel who’s fighting the good fight by taking on America’s evil military-surveillance apparatus — calling him the “American Wikileaks Hacker.”

Appelbaum emerged as a central in the Edward Snowden NSA leaks as well.

If you recall, Edward Snowden first contacted Glenn Greenwald, but Greenwald initially brushed him off as a crackpot. So Snowden went to Laura Poitras. Unlike Greenwald, she took Snowden seriously and decided to spend some time checking out his story. Snowden hadn’t yet revealed his identity at that point. So Poitras brought in Appelbaum to use his expertise to help vet Edward Snowden.

So just like that, you have a guy who had spent the past five years working as a security contractor for an outfit funded by the U.S. National Security State about as close to Snowden as you could get.

Even weirder is that Edward Snowden himself ran several high speed Tor nodes while working as an NSA contractor and had reached out and met with another key Tor developer just weeks before first contacting Glenn Greenwald…

What is then, in your opinion, the objective of Tor?

Well… there are several possibilities.

At it’s simplest, Tor performs the function for which it was originally created by the U.S. Navy and DARPA — that is, a tool that cloaks the online identity of government agents while they are in the field. And the rest of this stuff — the online protection of activists, dissidents, journalists, criminals, etc — is just a cover story meant to bring in as diverse a group of Tor users as possible, making Tor’s intel cloaking capabilities so much stronger.

Given the recent news of Tor being routinely undermined by U.S. intelligence, Tor could very well be a giant honeypot — drawing in people who have something to hide and then selecting them for total surveillance.

Tor is also a soft-power weapon of U.S. Empire — a tool deployed against countries like China and Iran to make it harder for them to control the Internet.

Tor could also be all those things: a honey pot, a tool of US intelligence and a soft-power weapon. I don’t think those functions are mutually exclusive. In fact, they may very well be synergistic.

How was your article received by the Tor developers and the users’ community?

Not well. Not well at all.

Instead of being welcomed by the privacy community and sparking a discussion about the some of the troubling aspects of Tor, my reporting was met with a nasty smear campaign. It was led by some of the most prominent privacy and anti-surveillance activists in the country —top people from groups like the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media. None of them disputed the facts, but resorted to the kind of PR smear tactics one usually sees used by oil company PR flacks, but not by privacy hacktivists.

In short: they tried to discredit my reporting by character assassination.

I was called a CIA agent, a rapist, a misogynist, a stalker, a conspiracy theorist, a loon. A Tor developer said I didn’t deserve to live, while the leading technology and privacy expert at the ACLU compared my reporting to the Elders of Zion — a sick anti-Semitic forgery disseminated by the Tsar’s secret police that helped unleash deadly pogroms against Jews across the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. The Guardian published a defamatory article by a Tor supporter calling me a sexist stalker, which the Guardian had to retract and apologize for. Even Anonymous joined in, using the biggest Twitter account of the movement to call for my death.

Little is known about the libertarian ideology of people generally described as “digital anarchists”. How do you think it influences his work?

Yeah, libertarian ideology is closely connected with Tor and the mythology of Tor and other Internet privacy technology.

It may be that there are legitimate uses for Tor. For instance, Tor might provide a good way for people in foreign countries to circumvent Internet censorship. These people might not care that Tor is funded and compromised by the US government, because they’re not hiding from the U.S. government. They are trying to hide from their own government.

But supporters of Tor go way beyond this.

Many of the most ardent supporters of Tor are hardcore libertarians — that includes Tor developers like Jacob Appelbaum, who has crafted an image for himself of some kind of anti-government rebel currently hiding out in Berlin from his NSA pursuers. They’re against mass politics and democracy, and desperately want to believe in a technocratic, individualistic solution to government surveillance.

And that’w where Tor comes in: They see it not as a limited tool, but a powerful magic cloak — like something out Harry Potter — that protect people and makes them invisible to Big Brother.

Naturally, Tor supporters get upset when this magic anti-government weapon turns out to a tool of the very government they’re fighting against. And as for Tor developers like Appelbaum — I can understand why they’re upset. They’ve sold themselves to the public as anti-National Security State rebels, but have actually been living off the largesse of their NatSec State nemesis.

And no one likes to be outed as a fraud.

Note: This is a slightly abridged English version of an interview conducted by the great Berlin-based journalist Àngel Ferrero. It was originally published in the Spanish media cooperative La Marea. You can read the full version in Spanish here. For background, read Yasha Levine’s Tor coverage here, here and here.

The new big thing on the web is all these sites with names like “I Hate France,” with supposed datelines of French military history, supposedly proving how the French are total cowards. If you want to see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

Well, I’m going to tell you guys something you probably don’t want to hear: these sites are total bullshit, the notion that the French are cowards is total bullshit, and anybody who knows anything about European military history knows damn well that over the past thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history in Europe, maybe the world.

Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I hate Chirac too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry ‘do and the snotty smile. But there are two things I hate more than I hate the French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful. I was raised to think ungrateful people were trash.

When I say ungrateful, I’m talking about the American Revolution. If you’re a true American patriot, then this is the war that matters. Hell, most of you probably couldn’t name three major battles from it, but try going back to when you read Johnny Tremaine in fourth grade and you might recall a little place called Yorktown, Virginia, where we bottled up Cornwallis’s army, forced the Brits’ surrender and pretty much won the war.

Well, news flash: “we” didn’t win that battle, any more than the Northern Alliance conquered the Taliban. The French army and navy won Yorktown for us. Americans didn’t have the materiel or the training to mount a combined operation like that, with naval blockade and land siege. It was the French artillery forces and military engineers who ran the siege, and at sea it was a French admiral, de Grasse, who kicked the shit out of the British navy when they tried to break the siege.

Long before that, in fact as soon as we showed the Brits at Saratoga that we could win once in a while, they started pouring in huge shipments of everything from cannon to uniforms. We’d never have got near Yorktown if it wasn’t for massive French aid.

So how come you bastards don’t mention Yorktown in your cheap webpages? I’ll tell you why: because you’re too ignorant to know about it and too dishonest to mention it if you did.

The thing that gets to me is why Americans hate the French so much when they only did us good and never did us any harm. Like, why not hate the Brits? They’re the ones who killed thousands of Americans in the Revolution, and thirty years later they came back and attacked us again. That time around they managed to burn Washington DC to the ground while they were at it. How come you web jerks never mention that?

Sure, the easy answer is because the Brits are with us now, and the French aren’t. But being a war buff means knowing your history and respecting it.

Well, so much for ungrateful. Now let’s talk about ignorant. And that’s what you are if you think the French can’t fight: just plain ignorant. Appreciation of the French martial spirit is just about the most basic way you can distinguish real war nerds from fake little teachers’pets.

Let’s take the toughest case first: the German invasion, 1940, when the French Army supposedly disgraced itself against the Wehrmacht. This is the only real evidence you’ll find to call the French cowards, and the more you know about it, the less it proves. Yeah, the French were scared of Hitler. Who wasn’t? Chamberlain, the British prime minister, all but licked the Fuhrer’s goosesteppers, basically let him have all of Central Europe, because Britain was terrified of war with Germany. Hell, Stalin signed a sweetheart deal with Hitler out of sheer terror, and Stalin wasn’t a man who scared easy.

The French were scared, all right. But they had reason to be. For starters, they’d barely begun to recover from their last little scrap with the Germans: a little squabble you might’ve heard of, called WW I.

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I’d really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about “surrender monkeys” with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You’d piss your dockers.

Shit, we strut around like we’re so tough and we can’t even handle a few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for five years, and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the Germans, not the French, who said “calf rope.”

When the sequel war came, the French relied on their frontier fortifications and used their tanks (which were better than the Germans’, one on one) defensively. The Germans had a newer, better offensive strategy. So they won. And the French surrendered. Which was damn sensible of them.

This was the WEHRMACHT. In two years, they conquered all of Western Europe and lost only 30,000 troops in the process. That’s less than the casualties of Gettysburg. You get the picture? Nobody, no army on earth, could’ve held off the Germans under the conditions that the French faced them. The French lost because they had a long land border with Germany. The English survived because they had the English Channel between them and the Wehrmacht. When the English Army faced the Wermacht at Dunkirk, well, thanks to spin the tuck-tail-and-flee result got turned into some heroic tale of a brilliant British retreat. The fact is, even the Brits behaved like cowards in the face of the Wermacht, abandoning the French. It’s that simple.

Here’s a quick sampler of some of my favorite French victories, like an antidote to those ignorant websites. We’ll start way back and move up to the 20th century.

Tours, 732 AD: The Muslims had already taken Spain and were well on their way to taking the rest of Europe. The only power with a chance of stopping them was the French army under Charles “the Hammer” Martel, King of the Franks (French), who answered to the really cool nickname “the Hammer of God.” It was the French who saved the continent’s ass. All the smart money was on the Muslims: there were 60,000 of them, crazy Jihadis whose cavalry was faster and deadlier than any in Europe. The French army was heavily outnumbered and had no cavalry. Fighting in phalanxes, they held against dozens of cavalry charges and after at least two days of hand-to-hand combat, finally managed to hack their way to the Muslim center and kill their commander. The Muslims retreated to Spain, and Europe developed as an independent civilization.

Orleans, May 1429: Joan of Arc: is she the most insanely cool military commander in history or what? This French peasant girl gets instructions from her favorite saints to help out the French against the English invaders. She goes to the King (well, the Dauphin, but close enough) and tells him to give her the army and she’ll take it from there. And somehow she convinces him. She takes the army, which has lost every battle it’s been in lately, to Orleans, which is under English siege. Now Joan is a nice girl, so she tries to settle things peaceably. She explains in a letter to the enemy commanders that everything can still be cool, “…provided you give up France…and go back to your own countries, for God’s sake. And if you do not, wait for the Maid, who will visit you briefly to your great sorrow.” The next day she put on armor, mounted a charger, and prepared to lead the attack on the besiegers’ fortifications. She ordered the gates opened, but the Mayor refused until Joan explained that she, personally, would cut off his head. The gates went up, the French sallied out, and Joan led the first successful attack they’d made in years. The English strongpoints were taken, the siege was broken, and Joan’s career in the cow-milking trade was over.

Braddock’s Defeat (aka Battle of Monongahela) July 1755: Next time you’re driving through the Ohio Valley, remember you’re passing near the site of a great French victory over an Anglo-American force twice its size. General Edward Braddock marched west from Virginia with 1,500 men — a very large army in 18th-c. America. His orders were to seize French land and forts in the Valley — your basic undeclared land-grab invasion. The French joined the local tribes to resist, and then set up a classic ambush. It was a slaughter. More than half of Braddock’s force — 880 men — were killed or wounded. The only Anglo officer to escape unhurt was this guy called George Washington, and even he had two horses shot out from under him. After a few minutes of non-stop fire from French and Indians hidden in the woods, Braddock’s command came apart like something out of Nam, post-Tet. Braddock was hit and wounded, but none of his troops would risk getting shot to rescue him.

Austerlitz, Dec. 1805: You always hear about Austerlitz as “Napoleon’s Greatest Victory,” like the little guy personally went out and wiped out the combined Russian and Austrian armies. The fact is, ever since the Revolution in 1789, French armies had been kicking ass against everybody. They were free citizens fighting against scared peasant and degenerate mercenaries, and it was no contest. At Austerlitz, 65,000 French troops took on 90,000 Russians and Austrians and destroyed them. Absolutely annihilated them. The French lost only 8,000, compared to 29,000 of the enemy. The tactics Bonaparte used were very risky, and would only have worked with superb troops: he encouraged the enemy to attack a weak line, then brought up reinforcements who’d been held out of sight. That kind of tactical plan takes iron discipline and perfect timing — and the French had it.

Jena, Oct. 1806: just a quick reminder for anybody who thinks the Germans always beat the French. Napoleon takes on the Prussian army and destroys it. 27,000 Prussian casualties vs. 5,000 French. Prussian army routed, pursued for miles by French cavalry.

You eXile guys might want to remember that the French under Napoleon are still the only army ever to have taken all of continental Europe, from Moscow to Madrid. I could keep listing French victories till I had a book. In fact, it’s not a bad idea. A nice big hardback, so you could take it to the assholes running all the anti-French-military sites and bash their heads in with it.

I am a convicted felon. I’ve never killed or raped anyone. I’ve never been involved in “commercial activities.” First I attended school, then a university. For two years I served in the Red Army. For the past six years I’ve been a journalist. Last year I was brought up on criminal charges by a Ukrainian court, convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. All I did was write a few words about the truth, which unfortunately later on I was unable to prove.

The trial was held in February of 1997. On top of the two years, the judge added a fine of $3,000. In Crimea, where the average salary for a journalist is $100 dollars a month, it is physically impossible to earn such a sum. That is, impossible to earn it by legal means.

Right now I’m in Moscow, under the protection of the Russian PEN club. I was forced to flee from the “free and democratic Ukraine”- a country where civil rights are not upheld and where the life of a man who is opposed to the existing regime is practically worthless. A country where the government mortally fears a journalist who tells the truth-fears him so much that it tries to imprison him, discredit him, kill him.

My aging mother remains in Crimea. To this day she cannot understand what crime her son is guilty of.

But I’ll describe everything in its own turn.

In 1994 I was invited to work for the Meshchanskaya Gazeta. At that time, the paper’s circulation, 220,000, was the highest in Ukraine. The newspaper was published in Simferopol, the capital of the Crimean Autonomous Republic. I sympathized with the political views of the paper’s publisher, Valeri Averkin: “The Crimea is a Russian territory, Sevastopol is a city of Russian fame.” Thirty years ago Nikita Khrushchev gave the Crimea to the Ukraine without having first conducted a popular referendum. 85 percent of the Crimean population are ethnic Russians. So the territory’s handover is highly questionable. That’s all we were telling our readers. We weren’t calling for an armed uprising, nor were we trying to fan the flames of nationalism. How could it even be a question of nationalism when, for example, my father is a Ukrainian from Kiev, and my mother, a Russian from Siberia? I guarantee that there are many, many children of mixed parentage, like myself, in Crimea.

Crimea held its presidential elections in 1994. Yuri Meshkov, a lawyer and one of the leaders of the Crimean Republican Movement, became our president. Our newspaper gave him our full support. However, only a year later, Meshkov was removed from his post. He was ousted illegally, through soviets on various levels. But the president was elected not by the soviets, but by the people, although the people proved to be of no concern to anyone in this matter. Yuri Meshkov emigrated to Russia and became a president-in-exile.

In 1995 the Ukrainian government initiated a wave of repression directed against Crimean citizens with pro-Russian sentiments. The victims were mostly journalists.

In the fall of 1995 I was driving the newspaper’s car through the mountains on my way from Simferopol to Yalta. A police post lies not far from where the road begins its downward descent. About a hundred meters from the post, I was stopped by four people attired in police uniforms. All four were armed with Kalashnikovs. I was ordered to step out of the vehicle, which I refused to do since the uniformed men neither introduced themselves nor showed me any documents. At which point two of them turned their automatics in my direction and opened fire.

In general, I’m a pretty bad driver. I’ve never had my own car and haven’t had much practice behind wheel. But at that moment, I was probably acting in accordance to some animal instinct and, because of it, managed to save myself. I ducked under the steering wheel, shielding myself from the bullets, and, by some miracle started the car moving. In the process my car ran over one of the gunmen. I’m not even certain whether they fired after me. Besides me in the car were our photographer and a female intern. Fortunately, they weren’t hit either. The car was turned into a sieve.

Attached to the front window of our old Mercedes 190 was a red and white placard with the word “Press”. It would have been impossible for “policemen” not to have seen it.

For some reason the incident did not cause any kind of reaction at the headquarters of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Crimea. The police investigation revealed that the attackers were not members of the police. In other words, everything was blamed on criminals who supposedly had wanted to deprive us of our car. However, I was able to uncover some information of a more curious nature. It turned out that two policemen posted at the station near which the incident took place were hospitalized, with fractures of various degrees of seriousness, the same night that the shoot-out happened. Interesting? Nonetheless, the police declined to conduct a further investigation. I believe that the attack on our car was carried out by the police on an order from above. But that, of course, is only conjecture…

The intimidation continued. I was frequently visited either at work or at home by unknown people who threatened and tried to bribe me. It’s unpleasant to even speak of it. They demanded that the newspaper change its position. By that time I was already the editor of the political and crime department, and I wasn’t in a position to bargain with anybody. So the newspaper continued on it’s pro-Russian course.

The newspaper was ultimately shut-down in 1996. At first, we were accused of improperly filing for our license. Then our bank accounts were frozen so they could supposedly be inspected. Our publisher was forced into bankruptcy. Yet even that wasn’t enough for them.

In May 1996 I received notification by mail that the prosecutor’s office had a criminal case against me for spreading of false information, citing Statute 125, paragraph 4, which carried a penalty of up to five years in prison. For what?!!!

The investigation lasted half a year. Three investigators came and went. I was hauled in for questioning almost daily. Local lawyers categorically refused to defend me, considering my case to be hopeless. Only one lawyer, Yuri Strebul, agreed to represent my interests in court. But even he after a while called me to say that his family was being pressured and that he would most likely be unable to help me.

Soon thereafter, Yuri Strebul was shot and killed near his house. The killers was never found. The question is whether anyone ever looked for them in the first place.

So I went to trial without an attorney. Ukrainian public defenders refused to represent me, and Russian ones were forbidden to take part in the process by the Ukrainian government. The trial itself was postponed for several months. The judge, named Zhivykh, who was overseeing my case, probably wanted to examine everything fairly. Which is probably why in February he, a healthy 45-year-old, died under peculiar circumstances. By the end of February, the newly appointed replacement for Zhivykh, a pudgy, red-headed battleaxe had already passed sentence: two years in prison with a two-year suspended sentence, plus the fine. For the duration of the two years, I was to check in with the police every month. If the police wished to file any claims against me, I was to be put in prison on the spot.

Everything my aging mother had in the house was confiscated. My father had died early, and all her life she had to raise me by herself. The court took EVERYTHING from the house- as reparation for my “crimes”. They sought to force me to beg for mercy, to appeal, to grovel on my belly before the Ukrainian government which trampled me underfoot. But no, I refused to abase myself. I worked for another year so as to somehow provide for my mother.

Finally, in April of this year, I illegally crossed the border and came to Moscow. Alexander Tkachenko, the general director of the Russian PEN-club, helped me to find a job and agreed to defend my honor and decency in court. Lawyers maintain that my case had been concocted.

My wife, Julia, joined me in my exile. On April 26 we celebrated our first wedding anniversary. In Moscow, we have neither a home nor relatives. We’re renting an inexpensive room and have barely enough money to eat. But at least here in Moscow, for some reason, we feel that we are safe.

We must remember the millions who died in the Soviet camps. Why? That nasty, nagging “why?” kept dogging me as I made my way through Anne Applebaum’s long (600 pp.) and well-researched history of the GULAG. If I hadn’t lived in Moscow from 2002 to 2004, I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to challenge Applebaum’s mission, commemorating the victims of Stalinism. But one thing you learn in Russia, whether you want to or not, is that the Russians are not interested in this subject at all. And their lack of interest is strangely contagious, infecting even formerly avid fans of Zek literature like myself.

Before living in Russia, I used to wonder why none of the sons or grandsons of GULAG prisoners hunted down the thugs who tortured and killed their relatives. It happened in China, where descendants of those persecuted by the Red Guard tracked down and beat or even killed ex-Guards. And there’s an army of well-funded pursuers tracking down the few living ex-Nazis. Why didn’t Russians go after Stalin’s surviving executioners?

The simple, disturbing answer is that they’re not interested. And that bothers us. It’s not that the West cares very much about the Russians — either the millions who died, or the 140 million struggling to live in contemporary Russia. We’ve made our indifference to them pretty clear, over the past fifteen years.

Rather we need to believe that everyone shares our alleged dedication to the Christian-derived notion that we have to love everyone. And that means mourning, or at least going through the motions of mourning, every mass death.

So we wait for the Russians to start moaning and gnashing their teeth over the GULAG, as we would wait for a bereaved family to start keening over their loss. We’ve been standing nervously outside the Russians’ hut for over a decade now, waiting for those banshee wails to trigger our public tears.

And there’s been this silence — at first puzzling, then offensive. And at last, realizing that these shameless Russians aren’t going to start their own rites, we decided to do the job ourselves.

Thus Applebaum’s book was born. And it has the feeling of a belated, awkward funeral oration by one who didn’t know the deceased very well, but is driven by a deep sense of moral righteousness to perform the proper rites. To her credit, Applebaum knows and admits that the Russians themselves aren’t interested in commemorating the victims of the camps. She mentions that the only monument they have in Moscow is a single stone from the Solovetsky Islands. We lived a block from that stone, and for two years we walked past it nearly every day. I don’t recall seeing anyone take notice of it, even once. It sat there, splattered with birdshit, facing Lubyanka — completely forgotten. By contrast, the statue of Dzerzhinsky, though exiled to the Statue Garden by the river, is covered with curses and homage, just biding its time.

Anne Applebaum bears the sufferings of Stalin’s GULAG victims

In her final chapter, “Memory,” Applebaum attempts to account for the Russians’ indifference. She’s quite intelligent for a conservative, and surprisingly fair-minded for someone associated with a Tory rag like the Spectator. She even acknowledges that anti-Soviet rhetoric is soiled, in the minds of most contemporary Russians, by its association with the Gaidar kleptocracy, and offers a cogent summary of other possible factors:

“There are some good, or at least forgivable, explanations for this public silence. Most Russians… spend all of their time coping with the complete transformation of their economy and society. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. Post-Communist Russia is not postwar Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities were still fresh in people’s minds.”

The comparison to post-1945 Germany is the crucial one, the one by which contemporary Russia keeps disappointing and annoying righteous Westerners like Applebaum. This is yet another case of the “Hitler Standard,” by which the Nazis are the gold standard of evil, and the painful rehabilitation of Germany after 1945 the gold standard of recovery.

And of course this version of what happened in Germany in 1945 requires a suppression of memory at least as great as that involved in Russia’s apathy towards Stalin’s crimes. In the first place, it’s not the case that Germany’s crimes, in general, made much of an impression on “people’s minds.” Germany’s crimes against Russians, in particular, were little noticed nor long remembered in the West — despite the fact that the majority of the Wehrmacht’s victims were Slavs.

Most massacre victims are the sort of people not likely to be remembered. This is one of those almost-tautologies that’s still worth saying, like the old evolutionary biologists’ joke that most of us are descended from people who didn’t die before puberty.

And as another cynical French wit put it, we are all very good at bearing the sufferings of others.

Only when a massacre is unusually dramatic and interesting, and/or involves people to whom we feel particularly close, do most of us feel anything. In other words, the Christian-derived premise that there is some Enlightenment moral sense in each of us, which reacts with instinctive horror at any mass suffering, is simply nonsense. There is no such sense — and a quick look at the archives of a Tory magazine like the Spectator, for which Applebaum proudly toiled, would reveal that fact a million times over. Ever hear of the “Black Hole of Calcutta”? Of course you did. That terrible overheated room in which some English prisoners were kept during the Indian Mutiny, so stifling that some of them actually died! Now, let’s do the math: what is the ratio of Indians killed during the British occupation to British prisoners stifled in the Black Hole? Few of you will have any idea, because those millions of dead never registered with us.

Applebaum would not have been capable of accepting a position with a vile publication like the Spectator unless her own consciousness contained at least one huge, highly adaptive amnesiac blob where all the crimes of the Empire should have been filed. So vast and horrific were these crimes, so long did they continue, that you could pretty much spin a globe, jab a finger at it blindfolded, and land on a spot where some Imperial force committed some sort of atrocity. (Unless, of course, you landed on ocean — though the Royal Navy would do its best to provide you with material even there.)

The crimes of history are optional. We mix, match and discard according to taste and convenience. It’s useful for Applebaum’s Tory backers to remember Stalin’s crimes because they can still use them to bash anyone who might want to beef up the National Health system with higher taxes. “Today an extra 1% VAT on my Jag convertible, tomorrow Kolyma!” is a very familiar war cry from these crusaders for human rights. Other massacres are dim stats, to be dredged up when necessary. Take, for example, all the tens of millions of dead in the Japanese occupation of China. They are rarely invoked in the West, because we don’t need them. The Japanese are thoroughly spent, neither a threat nor a bad example of anything we worry about at the moment. The Chinese are more of a worry, making the invocation of their dead a dangerous concession. And in the Tory mind, those dead are connected with ignominy: the surrender of Singapore without a fight, the sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Wales…and so it goes, with a huge number of tangential mental associations determining which of the billions of corpses clogging the earth will be dug up and flung at one’s opponents at any particular moment.

In this context, the Russians’ lack of interest in Stalin’s victims seems quite natural and healthy. It’s Applebaum’s arduous disinterment of them that ends up seeming forced, disingenuous and surprisingly dull.

A few days ago Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president and the hero of the Orange Revolution, received the Chatham House Prize for International Relations from the hands of the Queen of England. Some feted him for the Nobel Peace Prize, but after a series of political crises culminating in the resignation of his prime-minister — the “Glamour girl of the Orange Revolution” Yulia Tymoshenko — the notion soon became fairly ridiculous. It was quite appropriate in some sense — the consolation prize from the old musty monarchy, whose royal family became the laughingstock of the world in the last two decades, to the government of the “new East European democracy” which has already turned its country into a circus in just eight months.

Ukraine suddenly became popular, even genuinely fashionable, last year. Even before the “Orange Revolution,” you could see this coming. For example, the Ukrainian pop-singer Ruslana won the Eurovision song contest in 2004, allowing the freshly “orange” Ukraine to host this contest in February 2005. (That time, its entry for the contest, a “revolutionary” song cheering Yushchenko, flopped — as usual, fashion changes fast.) When Yushchenko prevailed in last year’s election marathon, with passionate demonstrations, a sea of waving flags, and a tent city of half a million supporters, the Western media ecstatically declared that Ukraine had “finally” placed itself in the Western camp and “liberated” itself from perfidious Russian influence.

But there is not any “final” thing in politics, least of all in Ukrainian politics, or Eastern European politics in general. The keys to understanding today’s political landscape in Ukraine can be found not in the European Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century, or the Russian political discourse of “slavophiles” vs. “westernizers” of the 19th century. Instead, one should reach back to the genius of the Ukrainian soul revealed some 150 years ago by Nikolai Gogol. Not his St. Petersburg stories, but wild folksy tales from the Ukrainian countryside — from “Taras Bulba” to “Evenings near Dikan’ka”, to “Vij” — crazy, passionate, irrational, with unruly Cossacks and wily peasants, with mythical creatures of the night and the underworld messing up human affairs.

Gogol’s name is in fact a popular brand, claimed by both Ukrainian and Russian cultures (in itself an indication that they are pretty close indeed, despite the claims of petty nationalists). There is a new punk group, Gogol Bordello, consisting mostly of Ukrainian immigrants living in New York, whose lead singer also played the main role in the film adaptation of Everything is Illuminated, based on a recent quirky best-seller by Jonathan Safran Foer. Their music is a wild combination of a classical Russian “blatnoy” chanson, gypsy dances and Ukrainian folk-tunes, sung in horribly-accented English. There is plenty of such stuff both in Russia and Ukraine (except for the English lyrics), but now Gogol Bordello has an international appeal beyond the local emigre crowd: they toured all over the U.S. and Europe and recently performed on the Conan O’Brian show.

You probably won’t find a better analogy for Ukrainian politics today. In Russia, Putin’s reign produced a faux-imperial center, with the restoration of many Soviet and some Tsarist traditions, with United Russia — the “party of power” — dominating the legislature. True, there is a colorful and very noisy fringe around the center, consisting of every tinge from the mystical conservative nationalists to delusional pro-Western liberals, but mainly they’re just providing a circus-like entertainment for the media and political “tusovka.” In Ukraine this fringe circus IS the politics — without anything resembling the stodgy, predictable center. You have a wild assortment of demagogues, nutcases and plutocrats with shifting alliances, silly slogans and their inevitable sponsorship by various rival oligarchic clans, still squabbling for privatization and re-privatization spoils.

President Viktor Yushchenko fires former-ally Yulia Tymoshenko

It’s a “Gulyay-Pole” of shifting sands and changing winds. Consider this schizophrenic sequence: the first Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk was once a loyal Communist Party secretary who flirted with the nationalist opposition in the last years of the USSR, but he also quietly supported the anti-Gorbachev putsch in August 1991. After the coup failed and central authority in Moscow essentially evaporated, Kravchuk became the main proponent of Ukrainian independence. In fact, he was largely responsible for the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the following months.

Then in 1994, as the newly independent Ukraine was in the middle of an economic collapse, and Kravchuk’s nationalist rhetoric lost its appeal, Leonid Kuchma won Ukraine’s presidential elections on a platform of economic pragmatism and closer relations with Russia. Kuchma switched his course many times during his presidency, alternatively courting and alienating Russia and the West. So did most of the other players in the Ukrainian political and economic elite.

Ironically, Kravchuk in the last elections found himself supporting the Yanukovych camp, advocating some of the most pro-Russian positions in current Ukrainian politics, a complete turnaround from where he was in the early 90s.

In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vehemently nationalistic politician named Vyacheslav Chornovil, leader of the popular anti-communist Rukh movement. He later died in mysterious circumstances in an automobile accident in 1999. His son, Taras Chornovil, is now a prominent politician from the other end of the spectrum: he served as an advisor to the pro-Russian Yanukovych campaign in the fall of 2004. The list goes on and on — there are plenty of other examples of alliances and affiliations changing chaotically many times.

Revolutions do eat their children — it is a fairly common fate. But few expected such a rapid, incredible unraveling as what happened after the Orange Revolution. In the first months of the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko government the economy nosedived. Instead of attracting foreign investments, both from Russia and Europe, investors were scared away en masse by Tymoshenko’s militant re-privatization talk. During the spring and summer the government managed to stumble into the “gasoline crisis,” the “flour crisis,” the “sugar crisis” and so on — all of them completely unnecessary — without producing even a fraction of promised and advertised reforms. From the rapid 12% growth of last year, and around 10% average for the Kuchma’s second term in office, growth slowed down to some 5% in the first half of this year and came to a halt in recent months (in August there was even an economic contraction). The first corruption scandals of the new government already exploded, and utter incompetence in many areas became too painfully visible.

Last month, as a result of the long and bitter dispute between two large oligarchic groups — one supported by Tymoshenko, the other by well-known smooth operator Poroshenko, who held the post of Secretary of the Security Council — the whole government resigned and Tymoshenko is now a fierce populist critic of the Yushchenko presidency.

As if there weren’t enough shenanigans by the leaders of the “new Ukraine,” their kiddies in just the last few months demonstrated plenty of rather peculiar behavior. First, Yushchenko’s son Andrei made himself known to the local paparazzi by cruising around Kiev in a luxurious BMW (costing reportedly some $130,000), flashing around a $25,000 cell phone, and spending thousands of dollars in the best restaurants. Once he left his car parked practically in the middle of the main Kiev thoroughfare, blocking traffic for hours, while having one of his famous nightlife outings with his girlfriend. The incident was too much to ignore, and was picked up by the local muckraking media. Later the nerdish Minister of the Interior Yuriy Lutsenko himself issued Yushchenko’s son a fine, equivalent to $3, in a televised session of the Rada (parliament), only to discover a few days afterwards that he didn’t have authority to do even that. It’s not clear to this day whether little Andrei Yushchenko actually parted with those three bucks as a severe punishment for his inappropriate behavior.

Yushchenko the President promptly made a fool of himself by attacking the journalists who dug up this whole story, yelling at the reporter who asked him about his son (the president had to apologize later). But that still wasn’t the main course of this spicy feast: a couple of weeks later it became known that Andrei Yushchenko somehow became the owner of the “Orange revolution” brands and trademarks. That’s right, folks: you thought that hundreds of thousands of orange-clad people demonstrating for many weeks on the snowy Maidan were fighting for “democracy,” “justice,” the “new, truly independent Ukraine”? Bwa-ga-ga!!! No, actually it was just a promo party for a new brand, with some cute logo and catchy tunes, owned by a 19-year- old “golden youth” with expensive tastes and a daddy who now owns the whole casino.

But Yulia Tymoshenko’s offspring weren’t too much behind. In late September the young, hot Evgenia Tymoshenko, 25 years old, married Sean Carr, 35 — the “aspiring” British rocker of the little-known heavy metal band “Death Valley Screamers” — in a heavily publicized ceremony in an ancient monastery near Kiev. Sean Carr looks like he might play a cut-throat in a pirate movie (no Johnny Depp here) and has a history of domestic abuse on his former wife (he was sentenced to two years probation). Yevgenia met him in a posh Mediterranean resort where she was vacationing from her studies in the London School of Economics, after spending almost a decade in an expensive private school in England. Not bad for a girl born in the grey industrial city of Dnepropetrovsk, where her mother began her career by marrying the son of a local Communist Party boss as a cute 18-year-old babe (and ditching him years later).

There was a saying about Romania at the end of the 19th century (attributed alternatively to Bismarck or Tsar Nicolas II): “Romania is not a country, it is a profession.” During the Kuchma presidency, to stress his independence credentials, Kuchma wrote a book, “Ukraine is not Russia.” It seems that given the present course of events the next big statement from the Ukrainian political leadership could be “Ukraine is not Romania” (but it could be Albania). And few would consider it a compliment to Ukraine. And much of the world would still wonder whether Ukraine is not that funny little Dikan’ka village from Gogol’s magical folksy tales.

DONETSK – Donetsk is a fascist city. I’m not using this term in the cheap way that it gets bandied around at a dinner table discussion between Republicans and Democrats. Donetsk actually is fascist. There is one party, people get beaten for opposition views, information is controlled, nationalist sentiment is enflamed with insane rhetoric about America/NATO plots to enslave Ukraine, and fear is the main motivating factor. It’s no coincidence that this is the side which Putin and the Russians are supporting. The “objective” Western press reports from there hide this fact by trying to “present both sides,” but I was just there, and there is no “other side.”

Just look at some examples of the fascist haze descending on Donetsk. Cable TV operators have actually stopped broadcasting opposition Channel 5. Media suppression of opposing views is so intense that it’s been driven literally underground — like the paper Ostrov that is being produced secretly. One local Yushchenko supporter told me about how her 9-year-old’s gym teacher asked the class who their parents voted for. “When the teacher found out that we were Yushchenko supporters, he made my son kneel in a corner for the entire class,” she told me.

When Salon, a Donetsk paper, reported two Sundays ago that a pro-Yushchenko rally was broken up before it even started, readers called to accuse them of printing lies — everyone here believes that it’s the Yushchenko protesters who have violent tendencies, even though there’s been a 30 percent drop in crime in Kiev since the protests started. What happened at that rally was that a well-organized group of men in track suits beat several people, including a Reuters photographer, and stole film and cameras — but officially, that simply didn’t happen. According to a spokesman from the Yushchenko headquarters, even an SBU operative (Ukraine’s FSB) recording the event for his own nefarious purposes was roughed up and had his video camera stolen.

This is part of a broader thug culture of Donetsk, part of a movement with Brown Shirts/Idushchii v Meste overtones. After a large rally last Monday, a group of 100 drunken thugs stood for hours shouting themselves hoarse and by 11pm, with no Yuschenko supporters to beat, several of them turned to fighting each other. While plenty of drunken people can be found among the protesters in Kiev (perhaps the most ecstatic participants in the revolution are the train station’s bomzhi, gorging themselves on free food and feeling safe now that the militsia has virtually disappeared), they aren’t aggressive or intimidating.

In Donetsk, they are frightening, unpredictable and above the law. Of course, that might just be Donetsk people acting normally. For example, there was a rumor that FT correspondent Tom Warner was beaten up by political thugs. As it turned out, he was simply robbed of his computer, phone and several hundred bucks by some common thieves. Another day, another crime.

* * *

Much has been made of eastern Ukraine’s support for Yanukovych, the pro-Russian prime minister who tried to steal the election. The Western and the Russian press both play up the issue, albeit for different reasons. Others, like my good friend Olya, who is an editor at a respected Ukrainian magazine, claimed everyone in Donetsk was just brainwashed.

What’s happening in Donetsk is the real key to figuring out what’s going to happen in Ukraine. The general situation in Ukraine has gotten plenty of coverage, but a brief outline of the facts is in order. Basically, Ukraine has always been divided into east and west, with the east Russian-speaking, heavily industrialized, and Russia-friendly; and the west Ukrainian-speaking, agrarian, and nationalist. Yanukovych is the east’s candidate, Yushchenko the west’s.

Almost all of Ukraine’s oligarchs are from the east or Kiev, and they almost exclusively lined up in support of Yanukovych, a Donetsk native. There are a few exceptions, notably Petro Poroshenko, the owner of car and candy factories and a ship-building yard. He also owns Channel 5, which was an invaluable tool in helping Yushchenko compete. In recent weeks, Channel 5 is the only Ukrainian channel to show news and propaganda 24 hours a day. A large part of the programming consists of watching Yanukovych’s team make asses of themselves. They often repeat a speech Yanukovych gave where he was gesturing with his fingers in the air, “paltsami,” a classic bandit gesture. Another favorite clip of theirs is of Yanukovych ally and Kharkov governor Kushnyarov gesticulating wildly and declaring, “I’m not for Lviv power, not for Donetsk power, I’m for Kharkov power!” Still, the biggest and most powerful clans are still behind Yanukovych, who is their man.

Yanukovych is a truly loathsome character. Most Ukrainians agree that if a more palatable candidate had been given the nearly unlimited access to “administrative resources” that Yanukovych had, he would have won handily. But Yanukovych twice served jail time in the Soviet Union, he has no charisma, and is obviously a tool of powerful Russian and Ukrainian interests. Yushchenko, on the other hand, is considered by most western Ukrainians to be something between Gandhi and Christ, while many people in the east worry he has it in for everyone who speaks Russian. Many people who voted for Yanukovych did so out of suspicion of Yushchenko, not because they like Yanukovych (except perhaps in his home turf, Donetsk).

While the country is relatively evenly divided, it’s a fact that Yushchenko would have won the election if it had been violation-free. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a fool or getting paid by the Russians. Even Putin, who called Yanukovych to congratulate him before all the votes were counted, recently said he’d be willing to work with any elected leader and seemed to acknowledge that there’d be a re-vote. Thanks to ballot-stuffing, Donetsk and the neighboring Lugansk oblast had by far the highest voter turnout in Ukraine (Donetsk had 97 percent turnout, of whom 97 percent voted for Yanukovych, and Yushchenko actually lost votes in between the first and second rounds of voting) and it’s on the basis of thousands of violations that the Supreme Court recently ordered a new round of voting. Channel 5 has plenty of footage of election observers getting the shit beaten out of them, and Yushchenko observers weren’t allowed anywhere near the polls in the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts.

The blatant falsifications, combined with an extremely well-funded and coordinated protest movement, have brought us where we are today, gearing for another round. The protests have come under fire as an American-funded coup, particularly in the Russian media. And there’s some truth to it — the US has been bringing in Serbs and Georgians experienced in non-violent revolution to train Ukrainians for at least a year. One exit poll — the one finding most heavily in favor of Yushchenko — was funded by the US. The smoothness and professionalism of the protest, from the instant availability of giant blocks of Styrofoam to pitch the tents on to the network of food distribution and medical points, is probably a result of American logistical planning. It’s certainly hard to imagine Ukrainians having their act together that well. The whole orange theme and all those ready-made flags also smack of American marketing concepts, particularly Burson-Marstellar.

But the crowds in Kiev, which can swell up to a million on a good day and are always in the hundreds of thousands, are there out of their own homegrown sense of outrage, not because some State Department bureaucrats willed them there. The meetings that happen every day in virtually every city in Ukraine (and in literally every western Ukraine village) are not the result of American propaganda. Rather, they are the result of the democratic awakening of a trampled-on people who refuse to be screwed by corrupt politicians again.

While you wouldn’t know it by watching Russian TV, maybe the only two cities in Ukraine where there are not Yushchenko rallies that outnumber the Yanukovych rallies are Lugansk and Donetsk. According to my friends in the heavily Russian Kharkov, for example, active Yushchenko supporters outnumber active Yanukovych supporters four to one. One reason why Lugansk and Donetsk are an exception is because every time Yushchenko’s people try to organize a rally there, they get beaten. Another is because the vast majority of those two regions really do support Yanukovych. So what gives?

* * *

For hours after the pro-Yanukovych rally ended on Monday, November 29, a parade of some twenty cars raced up and down Ulitsa Artyoma noisily demonstrating which candidate they preferred. Judging by many of the cars in the procession — a couple of new Mercedes, a novel Smart Car, other inomarki, and a custom-painted Lada souped up for drag-racing — the drivers were members of the Donetsk elite. Judging by the whoops and screams of the passengers, many of whom hung outside the sunroofs and windows waving blue flags, the paraders were quite young and totally wasted.

Unfortunately I’d just arrived in Donetsk that evening and only caught the tail end of the rally, so I didn’t know what’d gotten them so riled up. I later saw an excerpt of it on Channel 5, where Yanukovych’s wife Ludmilla said that everyone involved in Kiev’s protests was in a drug-induced haze. “On Maidan [where Kiev’s protests are centered*, they’re distributing oranges injected with narcotics that people eat, and everybody wants more, and nobody can leave the square.” Perhaps more shocking, no one in Donetsk even blinked at what she said. (And on Kremlin-controlled Russian TV, they repeat the same lies about the protestors either being “psychologically unhealthy” or drug addicts.) Calling the hundreds of thousands of protesters that come out daily in Kiev the product of oranges pumped with drugs is not just absurd, it’s stupid. And yet in Donetsk, they were buying it.

But the hoods with nice cars cruised, horns blaring until well after 11, alternately driving slowly to build up a column of traffic behind them and then accelerating, speeding over the limit, disregarding such niceties as red lights and traffic laws. The GAI were absent because presumably the action was approved from up high, and the punks no doubt had powerful parents. One of the newest Mercedes — an S Series — was equipped with a loud speaker, used by some young thug to startle unsuspecting pedestrians: “Are you for Yanukovych?” Everyone said yes, myself included.

Of course, horns these days are a popular means of expression in Kiev as well. But it’s not the same group of cars, driving in circles and intimidating people. Instead, drivers honk to express solidarity with the “orange” protesters and drive on to their destination. It’s spontaneous, an outburst of a new sense of freedom and empowerment. There’s even the occasional blue-bedecked car that is allowed to pass unmolested, although God save anyone dumb enough to wear orange in Donetsk.

In Donetsk, there are blue ribbons and flags, “Ya-Nu-Ko-Vych” chants and honking horns, daily meetings and concerts, all mimicking the protests in Kiev. But it is the opposition tactics that Yanukovych’s hacks have not mimicked that are more striking: no tent city, no out-of-towners (except the press-corps), no information distribution, no sense of debate, no tolerance, no grassroots organization. The Donetsk demonstrations are just displays of top-down managed “democracy,” and the population there is passive enough to swallow it.

* * *

The Tuesday rally, which I witnessed in full, was like watching a farce of a Nazi rally. This time they introduced Ludmila Yanukovych but made sure not to give her the mike, lest she say something as ridiculous as her spiked-orange theory. However, the other speakers weren’t much more sane. One speaker after another spewed venomous anti-Kiev, anti-western Ukrainian, and anti-American rhetoric at the crowd of several thousand. One of the more famous, Natalya Vitrenko, is sort of a Zhirinovsky without the slapstick element. Vitrenko argued that the US planned to colonize and enslave eastern Ukraine and would use NATO as its muscle. Another speaker warned that east Ukraine would beat back the Americans like they had the Germans, and reminded the audience that western Ukraine welcomed the Nazis with bread and salt, keeping in the theme that Yushchenko’s the fascist here. Some of the other arguments were just silly; one doctor said that Yushchenko was destroying the nation’s health by forcing students to spend long hours in the cold, thereby causing a public health crisis (a line echoed on Russian state television). Another said under Yushchenko people would be jailed for speaking Russian and that the “orange plague” was a terrorist organization. Another popular theory was that western Ukraine was planning on raping the riches of the east and only regional autonomy could save them. Every speaker was fear-mongering and totally detached from reality.

Everyone in Donetsk repeats the same figures and statements obsessively. 15 million voted for Yanukovych, he is the legitimate president, and Yushchenko is an unchecked fascist. People in Kiev are brainwashed and undemocratic; Russian-speaking centers Odessa, Kharkov, Dneipropetrovsk and the Crimea will leap at the chance to form a breakaway republic with them; American money is behind everything. Funny they never mention a word about Russian funds used by Yanukovych, although estimates of Russian contributions reach up to $300 million.

One of the great things about “orange” Kiev is that everyone everywhere is engaging in political dialog, arguing about what’s happening, what it means, and predicting how things will turn out. In Donetsk, everybody uses the exact same descriptions and expressions, because they’ve all been brainwashed. And they’re defensive about their beliefs, even on their home turf.

People here freely admit that Yanukovych is a dishonest politician with unsavory connections, saying “Yes, he’s a crook, but he’s our crook.” One guy I asked how he felt about Yanukovych’s jail past replied, “So what? I’ve been in jail, too.” The guy who said that had a valid point — Donetsk has always been a bandit city since the time the Soviets populated the region’s rich mines with ex-cons. There’s nothing exceptional here about having done time.

It’s clear by the overwhelming number of expensive boutiques, restaurants and casinos that Donetsk has a larger bandit class than most places. It certainly isn’t miners spending their pay in these places. Ukraine’s wealthiest man, Rinat Akhmetov, is from Donetsk and took over his empire from his relative, Oleg Grek (Oleg the Greek), who was shot dead in the city’s stadium during the bloody gang wars of the mid-90s. Akhmetov’s behavior mirrors the city’s values; when he wanted a new house, he simply seized a well-loved playground in the center and built a fortified castle-like compound, a la Tony Montana. Actually, it’s not that dissimilar to how they planned on installing Yanukovych.

Everyone in Donetsk, repeating the propaganda, will also tell you that they’d never use political beliefs as an excuse to do nothing, like the lazy people of Kiev, and that people here continue to work through the crisis. It’s well-known that Yushchenko’s people pay 400 hr. (over $70) a day to hire Donetsk protesters, but officially, no-one would ever sell out. For the record, the average monthly salary in Donetsk is 784 hr. People absolutely refuse to believe that there was vote fraud. Actually, they simultaneously argue that there was none and that it was no worse than the fraud in western Ukraine, as if that unsubstantiated claim is justification for vote-rigging. One of their favorite points is that coal miners started receiving their pay and factories started working when Yanukovych was governor. In fact, wage arrears in the Donetsk oblast are by far the largest in Ukraine, making up 28.6 percent of the country’s total. In second place, with 13.2 percent of the total, is Lugansk oblast.

Revisionism is rife here. Donetsk governor Anatoly Bliznyuk’s denied that there had been talk of separatism at a congress in Severodonetsk two days earlier, yet the congress’s words and actions had already been reported. Politicians like Bliznyuk only started backpedaling when Yushchenko threatened separatists with arrest.

The people in Donetsk simply parrot what they are told. On Monday, November 29th, the day after the Severodonetsk conference, several people told me that there were two options: separation or war. On Tuesday, when Kuchma and Yanukovych seemed to come out in favor of a revote in Donetsk and Lugansk, people here were for the revote.

Meanwhile, back in Kiev, it’s hard to imagine a more positive vibe. Seeing the process of nation-building develop in front of my eyes was an amazing experience. Ukrainians have always had a more mellow character than the Russians, and it shows through in their revolution. The stuff you read about protesters eye-to-eye with storm troopers is lies — there’s actually four lines of massive pro-Yushchenko miner- and peasant-types standing on shipping crates to keep protesters from direct contact with the militsia. The feeling on the street is festive.

Babes are everywhere, and it’s the only place I’ve ever been where a pickup line is totally unnecessary. If she’s wearing orange, you’ve got a common language. While some people have wild delusions of EU membership in five years or the end of corruption that will never happen, on the ground in Kiev it does seem like democracy and free press is achievable.

Back in Donetsk, there is no trace of irony when they describe Kiev’s demonstrators as fascists, zombies, censors and separatists, words they ought to self-apply. But it’s exactly this passivity that makes the threat of separatism so hard to take seriously.

* * *

So what is really going on in eastern Ukraine? Is it dangerous?

All that’s really happening is that the authorities in Donetsk are cynically manipulating the people out of fear for their own positions. While the meetings attract old and young, all of who come at their own accord, they can hardly be called grassroots.

People in Kiev have made it clear that they’ll stay put until they win, and they certainly would be out in force even if there weren’t speeches and music. But would people here come out in Donetsk the authorities didn’t organize meetings? From what I saw, no way.

What’s happening in Donetsk is simply the panic and hysteria of a corrupt regime desperate to cling to power. They’ve proved that they are able to mobilize large groups of people to defend their interests, but those crowds have no life of their own. Create a situation which the local authorities find acceptable and the protests will melt away. Give the local authorities a guarantee of immunity from prosecution and continued control of their fiefdom and they’ll abandon the separatist rhetoric.

The people of Donetsk might not be happy with that development, but then, they’re used to being betrayed and cheated by their leaders. In time-honored tradition, they’ll grumble about corruption and do nothing about it. Unlike the rest of Ukraine, they haven’t experienced the euphoria of living free, and until they do, they’ll have no way to vent their outrage.

Once A Warrior King

Mel Gibson’s Vietnam movie We Were Soldiers just hit New Zealand, so I’ve had to deal with endless commercials of that sagging beagle-face of his, carefully smeared with artificial dirt and smoke, rallying the troops in a laughable attempt at a Southern accent. Having seen The Patriot, featuring Mel doing a similarly rotten Carolina accent as he ran around chopping up Redcoats with a teeny little tomahawk, I think I’ll skip his remake of Vietnam.

But it did send me back to reread the book Mel bought to use as the basis of the film: We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. It seemed like a good occasion to review some of the innumerable Vietnam memoirs I’ve bought over the years.

Yes, chillun, I am old enough to remember that once upon a time, nice people didn’t even want to talk about Vietnam, let alone read about it. Now how did it git so’s they don’t hardly wanna talk ’bout nuthin’ else? Gather ’round the fire and I’ll tell you all about it.

Avoiding Nam was pretty much a fulltime job for sensible Americans of the 70s. It didn’t look like fun yet — not when it was actually happening. That took several years and about a thousand war memoirs. At the time, it looked like a remarkably uninteresting war, with wretched losers from inland America standing around the paddies twitching nervously, wondering whether the water buffalo in the next field was going to whip out a Kalashnikov and start shooting.

That changed very slowly. The first book to make Nam seem cool was Michael Herr’s Dispatches. This was the first Nam book taught at universities (I encountered it in a course at Berkeley). Herr wrote as one of the college boys who didn’t fight. He was there to watch, write, and make a name for himself. He wrote guilty erotica, and spoke for the smart guys who got themselves deferments but always wondered what they would’ve done if they’d gone: “You know how it is, you want to look and you don’t want to look. I can remember the strange feelings I had as a kid looking at the war photographs in Life…”

Since the deferred guys were the core of the teaching pool at most American universities, they tended to assign Herr’s book, and it became one of those “instant classics” which make it more for demographic than artistic insights. Herr’s book was a first draft of Apocalypse Now, with Hendrix soundtrack and quick cuts between cool gore and Saigon lies. It doesn’t read particularly well now; there’s too much caution there, like someone trying to do Hunter S. Thompson after halfheartedly inhaling one tiny line of speed. But then that’s always the way to crack the upscale porn market: just a little whiff of the really hard stuff, enough to grab the safe people. After all, the safe, guilty males of the Nam era had two advantages over the ones who went: they had graduated to teaching jobs and could force large numbers of students to buy the book — and they were alive.

Herr’s book came out in ’77, two years after the fall of Saigon. It was a while before anybody wanted to hear from the losers who’d actually gone and fought in Nam. It took a lot of concerted lying, in films like Deer Hunter, to erase all those images and persuade the home folks that the enterprise had been a noble one.

In strictly literary terms, this great lie was of some benefit, because there are few genres as rich as the war memoir. Virtually anyone who saw combat and has a decent memory can write a decent book about it — and Vietnam, a war characterized by thousands of small skirmishes, was richer in incident and gore than an inner-city basketball tournament. When next you hear that rough voice asking, “War — what is it good for?”, you tell it: “First-person memoirs, that’s what!”

By 1981, the memoirs were coming fast. The first and in some ways still the best was Everything We Had, a collection of oral reminiscences by 33 vets who’d done everything from nursing the wounded to slitting throats with Bob Kerrey and his pals. I’d still recommend this book as a starter-kit for the prospective Nam fan, because the 33 voices offer something for virtually everyone. Parts of the book are very funny, as when Gayle, the cute li’l nurse, recalls her answer when asked if she’d serve on a ward for Vietnamese casualties: “And I said, ‘No, I would probably kill them.’ and she said, ‘Well, maybe we won’t transfer you there.’” And they say the Army has no heart!

By the early 80s, it was not just cool to’ve served in Nam; it was glorious. It was, in fact, the only sort of martial glory available (Grenada didn’t quite carry the same “cachet,” as they said in the Reagan era.) Every Vet still alive and compos mentis — and some who weren’t — headed for that early-model KayPro or Northstar keyboard to turn his ranting into cash. They were a little confused at first, having been shunned and pitied as they dragged their way from halfway house to detox to medium-security institution…but slowly a canny ambition shouted down the voices babbling in their addled heads with the news that the war stories which had driven the wife and kids to move out with no forwarding address were now box-office boffo.

And damned if many of them, fingers trembling on the keyboard, one hand on the Jack Daniels or rolled-up twenty, didn’t hunt-and-peck out some quite good books.

This high literary output was a delayed gift of the utter lack of strategy which doomed the American enterprise in Vietnam: a war which consisted largely of sending small contingents of infantry out into the jungle to find the enemy, usually by getting ambushed, is bound to be a military disaster — but equally bound to produce an extraordinary number of fantastic combat tales. As Walter puts it in Big Lebowski: “Me and Charlie, eyeball to eyeball.” Throw in the treachery of the South Vietnamese, the social and racial bombs going off non-stop back home, the feeling of abandonment, the music — greatest soundtrack of any war ever — and you had the elements of better stories than more intelligently-conducted wars could ever yield. (If there were any true aesthetes worthy of Oscar Wilde’s mantle, they’d've agitated for the continuation of the war at all costs. Alas, dreary Utilitarian ethics have conquered us so thoroughly that not a single voice urged the continuation of the war as the greatest performance art of the century.)

I’ve read a dozen of these memoirs, and enjoyed almost all of them. They come in all flavors. There’s the raunchy defeatism of F. N. G., which describes a “fuckin’ new guy” entering an infantry squad after Tet, when the Americans had pretty much given up trying to win and were fighting a strange, highly mobile but essentially defensive war. Then there’s Once A Warrior King, describing one very conservative Virginian’s relatively straightforward war, working with a fiercely anti-VC village in the Delta. This is Greene’s Quiet American told by the quiet A. himself, as it were — and he tells a good story. It’s the food I remember best, in that one: the long descriptions of roasted rat with fish-sauce. That’s one of the delights of war and prison memoirs: you can count, in these solidly grounded stories, on some excellent descriptions of meals good and bad. (The POW memoir, combining the genres, often yields the most mouth-watering descriptions of all; if you want a book full of the delight of eating, read Brendan Behan’s one good book, Borstal Boy.)

The best of all these might be Chickenhawk, the story of a helicopter pilot who was, as Martin Sheen says of “Chef” in Apocalypse Now, “…wound up a little too tight for Vietnam.” Robert Mason, the pilot-narrator, takes the reader in and out of so many LZs, hot, cold and medium, that you develop a veteran’s wince everytime his slick starts descending toward the purple smoke.

One of the many delights of Mason’s book is that it describes the battles for the Ia Drang — the same campaign glamorized in We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, the book Gibson filmed. The campaign, which is depicted as a noble, though doomed, strike for freedom in We Were Soldiers…. doesn’t come off so well in Mason’s memoir. In fact, he and his fellow pilots seem to have done something the generals in charge of the operation didn’t do: read the books about earlier French campaigns against the Viet Minh in that same valley. Mason and his drunken buddies end up predicting the failure of the campaign while their superiors are still sending home the sort of communiques which did so much to cement the American Army’s reputation for…er, “emphasizing the positive,” let’s say.

But Mason’s topper, his most brilliant passage, comes at the very end, in the epilogue summarizing his messed-up return to civilian life. Here’s the superb two-paragraph conclusion, describing his next move after the early drafts of his Nam memoir had been rejected and he’d failed in everything he tried since getting back to The World:

“What did the desperate man do? I can tell you that I was arrested in January, 1981, charged with smuggling marijuana into the country. In August 1981, I was found guilty of possession and sentence to five years at a minimum-security prison. I am currently free as of February 1983, appealing the conviction.

“No one is more shocked than I.”

Just roll that last sentence over on your tongue. “No one is more shocked than I.” Now there is a meal. Even the fussily correct grammar, that annoying “…than I” rather than the colloquial “than me” or “…than I am”; so perfectly droll, such a change from the Nam dialogue in which every other word is “fuckin’”. And the grand historical irony, that the junked helicopter jock should become desperate enough to sell his one skill to the only people who wanted it, the drug dealers, designated New Enemy of the Reaganites. And the timing! Mason’s manuscript got four rejections in the years leading up to 1981, when the memoirs started appearing. A little later, and he’d've been cool. But that would have been disastrous. To go to prison for piloting a helicopter full of drugs, albeit unworthy boring drugs like marijuana, even as that great war-dodging hypocrite Reagan shoved his leathery grin in front of the flag — ah, It’s a fate better than death.

This article was published in The eXile on June 28, 2002

]]>http://exiledonline.com/books-that-was-in-nam/feed/1TSA and Pigs: How the left and right united to turn TSA agents into public enemy number onehttp://exiledonline.com/tsa-and-pigs/
http://exiledonline.com/tsa-and-pigs/#commentsWed, 06 Nov 2013 01:00:07 +0000Yasha Levinehttp://exiledonline.com/?p=61571

On Friday morning, 23-year-old Paul Ciancia walked into Terminal 3 of the Los Angeles LAX airport, pulled a Smith & Wesson AR-15 semi-automatic rifle from a duffel bag and started shooting his way through a security checkpoint. He specifically targeted TSA agents, killing one screener and wounding three other people before an airport cop took him down with a shot to the face.

At first police suspected that the shooter was a disgruntled former TSA employee. But a different picture emerged a few hours later: Ciancia was an anti-government conspiracy nut who came to LAX specifically to kill TSA agents.

One witness said she looked directly into Ciancia’s eyes and heard him “curse the TSA.” Several FBI sources told reporters that Ciancia carried a rambling racist and homophobic note that touched on “fiat currency” and the New World Order, denounced TSA oppression and described himself as a “pissed-off patriot” who “wanted to kill TSA and pigs” to “instill fear” into their “traitorous minds.”

While details about the LAX shooter continue to emerge, it has become clear that Paul Ciancia is a mentally unstable individual who had come under the sway of some very toxic anti-government conspiracy theories. But one question remains: Why did he focus his hatred on the TSA? Out of all the possible federal agencies to choose from, what convinced him that airport screeners – who don’t have arrest powers and aren’t allowed to carry weapons – are the root of all government evil, and deserve to be hunted down and killed like animals?

In a way, it was just a matter of time before something like this happened. For the past three years, a vicious PR campaign has demonized and dehumanized TSA screeners. Launched by the libertarian-right, this smear offensive sought to equate the TSA in the public mind with the worst people imaginable: Nazis, rapists, gropers, child molesters and sadistic enforcers of a police state.

The right-wing echo chamber would routinely trot out violent tropes and racist and homophobic language describing the TSA as Obama’s “private army” and calling on liberty-loving Americans “to do something” to stop this “bureaucratic monster.”

But while this anti-TSA campaign was created by the libertarian-right, it was enabled and strengthened by the left. Some of the most prominent progressive and leftie bloggers and journalists took an active part in the TSA media witch-hunt. They joined the right in labeling the TSA as America’s enemy within, unaware that underneath the big-brother rhetoric and feigned right-wing concern about civil liberties, the anti-TSA campaign was really a union-busting operation with a specific set of political goals: to prevent the TSA from unionizing, to privatize airport security and to introduce Israeli-style racial profiling into the airport-screening process.

Progressives like to smugly ridicule dumb red-state voters who go against their own interests by joining political movements and by voting in politicians who end up screwing them. But as smug as they are, progressives have shown themselves no better. By joining the anti-TSA hysteria, they became unwitting tools in a campaign that promoted everything progressives are supposed to be against: demonizing workers, busting unions, privatizing government services, replacing unionized government employees with exploited minimum-wage-slaves and enriching corporate security contractors.

How did this happen? How did the left get duped into joining an anti-labor and pro-privatization campaign? To understand that, you have to go back to 2010.

That year, on November 12, the Federal Labor Relations Board issued a surprise ruling granting TSA’s 50,000 employees the right to unionize. The decision was a major victory — the culmination of a brutal decade-long struggle for collective bargaining — and paved the way for the largest unionization in decades.

But rank-and-file TSA employees didn’t get much of a chance to celebrate. The very next day, an anti-TSA campaign exploded on a national level and proceeded to monopolize the news cycle for weeks on end.

They seized on the TSA’s new full-body scanners and “enhanced” pat-down procedures to portray TSA screeners as the biggest threat to liberty and freedom in the history of the United States. It began with the Drudge Report publishing and promoting the now-famous “Don’t Touch My Junk” video, which was recorded by John Tyner, a libertarian activist and a Bircher supporter who just so happened to be a military-intelligence contractorworking for a company that makes drone and NSA spy satellite components.

And while Matt Drudge continued to push out fake stories of TSA agents strip-searching children, grabbing crotches and groping nuns, cable news networks scrambled to interview other “ordinary Americans” who had experienced abuse and police-state repression at the hands of the TSA.

A FreedomWorks employee claimed she had been molested by TSA agents, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera said he “got manually raped by a guy” at a TSA checkpoint, while Hannity interviewed an Ohio woman who was “sexually assaulted by a TSA worker during a pat down.” Evangelical homophobes got into the mix, accusing the TSA of pursuing a “homosexual agenda” to turn innocent American children into queers by groping and scanning them at the gate.

Glenn Beck devoted entire shows to highlighting fake TSA abuse stories and warning that the TSA was just the beginning of a totalitarian plot to crush political dissent and turn American into USSA.

Meanwhile, Alex Jones turned his InfoWars video show into a TSA conspiracy content mill that routinely “uncovered” diabolical plots involving the TSA, President Obama and his afro-commie conspirators. In one such plot, InfoWars warned that President Obama and Jesse Jackson were planning to use armed TSA agents to “occupy” cities across America, starting with Chicago:

For the record, the TSA is Obama’s so-called “civilian national security force.” They are the new non-military, non-sworn “army” that’s slated to occupy U.S. cities.

This was the plan all along, of course: Disarm the citizens then wait for violence to get so bad that the public screams for the government to intervene. The TSA is ready to step in with its army of perverts, child molesters, drug dealers, thieves and child porn distributors — yes, these are precisely the kind of people who work for the TSA. Now Jesse Jackson apparently wants to put guns in their hands and give them “authority” over the disarmed citizens.

…Bottom line? What Jesse Jackson is calling for is the rise of an armed domestic security force like Hitler’s Brownshirts.

Even a warmongering zombie like Charles Krauthammer abandoned his usual pro-torture, pro-war op-ed writing to stand against the tyrannical gropers at the TSA: “Don’t touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man…This time you have gone too far, Big Bro‘. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don’t touch my junk.”

It was like the Second American Revolution— a purely astroturf revolution this time, waged without the support of most Americans. Despite the insane anti-TSA hysteria piped out by the right-wing echo chamber, polls showed people overwhelmingly supported the new TSA procedures. One CBS poll put the number at 82 percent.

In the days that followed, some of the most prominent progressive journalists, bloggers and media outlets flocked to join the anti-TSA smear circus, adopting the same toxic right-wing lingo that dehumanized TSA employees and invited violence.

Glenn Greenwald was perhaps the earliest and most prominent progressive-leaning blogger to take up the TSA cause. He referred to TSA agents as government thugs, described airport pat-downs as “extremism” and went on a full McCarthyite rant declaring that not standing up against TSA screeners was equivalent to “accepting in the name of Fear that you must suffer indignities, humiliations and always-increasing loss of liberties at the hands of unchallengeable functionaries of the state.”

Greenwald attacked people who dared criticize the TSA-outrage manufactured by the libertarian-right, smearing them as subservient Obamabots and squishy fascists.

Greenwald’s popularity and influence helped drive leftie and prog outrage at fake TSA abuses, but he wasn’t the only one flogging this cause.

The “progressive” blog FireDogLake was perhaps the biggest and loudest leftie media outlet to promote the anti-TSA crusade. The site even launched a “Petition to Investigate the TSA,” adopting right-wing lingo in calling the agency’s pat down procedures “aggressive groping” and getting “sexually assaulted by a government official.” FireDogLake blogger Marcy Wheeler frequently referred to TSA checkpoints procedures as “rape” and “groping.” In December 2010, she warned her readers that anywhere from a quarter-million to 1 million people ”had their genitalia groped by a stranger working for the government” in a single week, and the Obama administration simply didn’t care. “That sort of seems like a lot of junk-touching in just one week.”

Hacker activist Jacob Appelbaum bought into the outrage too, promoting the same articles as anti-semitic Illuminati conspiracy theorist David Icke and Tweeting: “The TSA Gestapo Empire, like the future, is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed. (yet.)”

Even legendary Nation editor, Tom Engelhardt fell for the anti-TSA trap. He saw the TSA as an extension of the creeping “national security state,” a totalitarian society where “safety” means “your humiliation, your degradation.” He also praised right-wingers agitating against the TSA: “Now, for the first time in years, the oppressiveness of a national security state bent on locking down American life has actually gotten to some Americans…the idea that air travel may now mean a choice between a spritz of radiation and a sorta naked snapshot or—thrilling option B—having some overworked, over-aggressive TSA agent grope you has caused outrage…”

Without a doubt, there was a lot to criticize about the TSA’s full-body scanners and invasive pat-down procedures, which are offensive and intrusive. Criticism of the TSA was not only valid, but also necessary. But there was a huge distance between criticizing TSA policy and the vicious smearing of poorly paid federal employees as “rapists” and “fascists,” especially when these employees were in the middle of a historic unionization drive.

All this was lost on most progressives, who rushed in to prove that they also care about civil liberties and won’t take it from “the Man” just because they’re squishy progs. The few people who remained vocally skeptical of the TSA lynch mob were either Democratic Party operatives, or labor organizers and journalists, who understood too well what the demonization campaign was about: union-bashing.

No one else found it strange that the anti-TSA civil liberties cause had been taken up by a bunch of right-wing warmongers, anti-civil rights crusaders and waterboarding-cheerleaders like Rick Perry, Glenn Beck, Wall Street Journal’s Koch groupie John Fund, and Utah’s Tea Party Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who had just the year before come back from a fact-finding mission to Guantanamo Bay and declared that conditions there resembled an all-inclusive Caribbean resort. Chaffetz was surprised that “[detainees] have access to hundreds of movies such as Oceans 13, Liar Liar, and Finding Nemo” and can choose from a wide selection of flavored force-feeding goo: “We go to great lengths to see that their nutritional needs are met, even offering a variety of flavored liquid nutrients to detainees participating in hunger strikes.”

Also, no one seemed to mind that the people screaming loudest against abuse wanted to replace the TSA screeners with private security firms and Israeli-style racial profiling, and argued that the free-market would prevent private companies from infringing the civil liberties of the American people. And none of these progressives seemed to care that this vicious demonization campaign could have serious real-world consequences for the agency’s 50,000 employees.

* *

The TSA was created in the months after 9/11 with wide public support and a mandate to improve airport security. Until then, airport screening was handled by private security firms, which paid minimum wage, provided inadequate training, cut corners and generally did everything to squeeze profits out of their lucrative government contracts. But after these security contractors spectacularly failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers, the American public demanded better security and got it in the form of federal TSA screeners, signed into law by President George W. Bush himself.

But all was not well in the land of the TSA. Because the GOP successfully managed to block TSA unionization attempts for nearly a decade, the TSA remained plagued by many of the same problems as the private contractors the agency was supposed to replace.

TSA employees had little recourse against powerful TSA management. Abuse and intimidation flourished in an environment where workers lacked the basic protections and rights afforded to other federal employees. TSA management was flooded with reports and complaints of sexual harassment, illegal firings, discrimination, nepotism and rampant bullying by superiors. The agency suffered from the lowest morale and highest turnover rates among federal agencies, and TSA workers had a shocking injury rate: seven times higher than that of miners.

Conditions at the TSA were so bad that in 2008, Bush’s last year in office, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General published a report thatwarned it was negatively impacting airport security.

There was hope that conditions would improve after TSA workers voted to unionize in 2011. But the vicious anti-TSA campaign quickly kneecapped their union’s negotiation powers and made it impossible for the union to stand up to management and demand better treatment.

“Many TSA union leaders say that it has been very difficult to draw attention to the refusal of TSA to bargain a fair contract with workers because of media outlets’ negative portrayal of TSA search procedures,” reported Mike Elk (a sometime NSFWCORP contributor) in “In These Times” in 2012.

He pointed out that even after unionizing, TSA agents remained among the lowest paid federal employees and still faced routine abuse and sexual discrimination, with women frequently forced into lower paid TSA job categories. In short: the anti-TSA union-bashing op. was a success.

On top of crushing the TSA’s bargaining power, the relentless smear campaign against the agency fostered an increasingly violent and dangerous work environment. Passengers routinely lashed out at TSA screeners, with verbal abuse sometimes turning into physical violence. Aviation blogger Steven Frischling asked TSA screeners to share their workplace experiences a week into the anti-TSA campaign in November 2010, and their responses were shocking. Here are a just a few:

“Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep. These are all words I have heard today at work describing me, said in my presence as I patted passengers down. These comments are painful and demoralizing, one day is bad enough, but I have to come back tomorrow, the next day and the day after that to keep hearing these comments. If something doesn’t change in the next two weeks I don’t know how much longer I can withstand this taunting. I go home and I cry. I am serving my country, I should not have to go home and cry after a day of honorably serving my country.”

“I served a tour in Afghanistan followed by a tour in Iraq. I have been hardened by war and in the past week I am slowly being broken by the constant diatribe of hateful comments being lobbed at me. While many just see a uniform with gloves feeling them for concealed items I am a person, I am a person who has feelings. I am a person who has served this country. I am a person who wants to continue serving his country. The constant run of hateful comments while I perform my job will break me down faster and harder than anything I encountered while in combat in the Army.”

“Do people know what a Nazi is? One can’t describe me as a Nazi because I am following a security procedure…designed to find prohibited items on a passenger’s body. A Nazi is someone with hatred and ignorance in their hearts, a person who carried out actions of execution and extermination of those based on their religion, origins or sexual preferences. I work to make travel safer, even if I do not agree with the current security procedures. Furthermore, I am Jewish and a TSA Transportation Security Officer, an American Patriot and to call me a Nazi is an offense beyond all other offenses.”

That abuse continued to grow. “TSA employees told ‘In These Times’ that on a daily basis, workers are shouted at and have obscenities hurled at them by airline passengers upset for following TSA search procedures. Several workers complained that on several occasions airline passengers had physically assaulted TSA workers, but the passengers were allowed to board flights because TSA screeners are unable to arrest passengers who assault them,” wrote Mike Elk in 2012.

With all the venom the media was hurling their way, TSA screeners felt increasingly uneasy, worrying that it was just a matter of time before some unstable dupe took the smears literally and started targeting agents for assassination.

Without a doubt, the anti-TSA campaign made the TSA a more dangerous place to work. But campaigners like Radley Balko mocked TSA safety concerns. Formerly a Cato Institute tobacco lobbyist and now a crusader against police militarization at the HuffingtonPost, Balko has been agitating against the TSA as far back as 2008, when he published a Fox News column asking President Obama not to let the TSA unionize because “Security from terror attacks should not be a federal jobs program. You need the authority to fire underperforming screeners quickly and effortlessly.”

In 2012, he laughed at TSA screeners, calling their job safe and easy. He Tweeted:

When Jared Laughner shot Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, leaving six people dead and and over a dozen injured, there was widespread outrage at and condemnation of the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric pumped out by the Republican right against its opponents. Lefties and progressives believed that this kind of political agitation, which often explicitly called for violent action, had directly motivated the shooting.

People were shocked to learn that Sarah Palin’s PAC had produced a graphic that put Congresswoman Giffords in the crosshairs for her support Obama’s healthcare bill, which Sarah Palin promoted by Tweeting: “Don’t retreat, instead – RELOAD!”

But so far the left has been strangely silent about the violent right-wing rhetoric and conspiracy-mongering that inspired the TSA shooting at LAX. I guess that isn’t very surprising, considering the left helped enable it.

Ever since Malcolm Gladwell’s “David and Goliath” came out in early October, he’s been on a non-stop promotional tour. He’s appeared on the BBC and the Daily Show, he’s done Twitter group chats and Ted Talk Q&As, and has had negative and positive reviews published in dozens of media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian. But despite all this PR attention, as far as I can tell, no one’s really described in plain English what the book is about. And that’s just weird…

So let me be the first: The book is about pitying the rich. Its central thesis: being poor, crippled and/or discriminated against helps you succeed in life.

“We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.”

“David and Goliath” is the right book for our times. America is in the grips of historic economic inequality, unemployment and misery; it’s being looted and trashed by finance hucksters and extraction industry oligarchs, while its citizens are disengaged and distracted and too tired and overworked to really do much about it.

Gladwell offers to soothe this swirling world of shit, misery, exploitation and corruption with a simple counterintuitive message: People who live paycheck to paycheck or dig in the trash, well, they’re not as disadvantaged as popular wisdom would have us believe. The truly disadvantaged are the rich. Because wealth, power, mansions, Porsches, private jets, servants, elite private schools, influence and access — all those great things — are barriers preventing them from realizing their true potential and achieving success. In short: Wealth holds you back.

It’s an ambitious theory, and Gladwell goes to great lengths to prove it. He circles the globe, traveling from Los Angeles to Birmingham to Belfast, seeking out fascinating people, touching stories and counterintuitive science to show his readers that everything they think they know about wealth, privilege and advantage is wrong.

It’s quite a trip. Along the way, he offers comfort and consolation to a Hollywood tycoon because he “had too much money,” consoles a young woman from a well-to-do family who ruined her life by attending an Ivy League university, cites an anti-union economist to prove that cramming kids into classrooms like sardines improves education, and then grieves for kids enrolled in top tier private schools because of their extremely low student-to-teacher ratios.

“A half-hour drive up the road from Shepaug Valley, in the town of Lakeville, Connecticut, is a school called Hotchkiss. It is considered one of the premier private boarding schools in the United States. Tuition is almost $50,000 a year. The school has two lakes, two hockey rinks, four telescopes, a golf course, and twelve pianos. And not just any pianos, but, as the school takes pains to point out, Steinway pianos, the most prestigious piano money can buy. Hotchkiss is the kind of place that spares no expense in the education of its students. The school’s average class size? Twelve students. The same condition that Teresa DeBrito dreads, Hotchkiss—just up the road—advertises as its greatest asset. ‘[Our] learning environment,” the school proudly declares, “is intimate, interactive, and inclusive.’Why does a school like Hotchkiss do something that so plainly makes its students worse off?“

It’s all very sad and moving, especially when you consider that Hotchkiss produced so many notable losers that there’s a Wikipedia page dedicated only to listing famous Hotchkiss School alumni. But this is just the beginning of Gladwell’s epic story.

“David and Goliath” isn’t only about how rough the wealthy have it. Gladwell also tells the inspiring stories of folks who climbed out of crushing poverty, overcame their physical handicaps and clawed their way to dizzying heights of success — all while interspersing them with philosophical musings on the nature and interconnectedness of struggle, suffering and success: “If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force.” Now that’s deep, man.

Gladwell introduces you to Goldman Sachs President Gary D. Cohn, whose childhood struggle with dyslexia is what made him the successful finance huckster that he is today. You also get to visit the home of pioneering oncologist Jay Freireich, who helped develop the first treatment of leukemia because he grew up in a poor Hungarian immigrant community during the Great Depression, had his father abandon the family and watched his mother waste away in a sweatshop:

“Freireich had the courage to think the unthinkable. He experimented on children. He took them through pain no human being should ever have to go through. And he did it in no small part because he understood from his own childhood experience that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.”

Hallelujah! What an uplifting story! Just think of all the future pioneering doctors and scientists that will be forged in today’s economic depression! There are an estimated three million children in the US living in third-world-level “extreme poverty” subsisting on “$2 or less, per person, per day.” Who knew that all that squalor and hardship was really an investment into their future! It would be criminal to allow the government to help these kids — these future inventors and finance tycoons — with “beneficial” programs like food stamps, healthcare or better education. If we were to help them now, we’d be robbing these poor kids of their last valuable possession: the democratic opportunity to strive and struggle and scrape to success!

What data does Gladwell use to prove his novel survival-of-the-fittest social theory? Well, there’s the problem: academic types have been tearing into the book’s shoddy methodology. In reviews published in places like the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Slate and The New Statesman, these pointy head critics accused Gladwell of cramming his book with so many contradictions, inconsistencies, simplifications, half-truths and newagey babble that it made his conclusions irrelevant and untrustworthy. The criticism has been so diverse and sustained that Gladwell was forced to respond.

“If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them: you’re not the audience!” he yelled during an interview with the Guardian. He even published a weird personal attack against one of his critics, a Union College psychology professor by the name of Christopher Chabris, bringing Prof. Charbis’ wife into the fight, writing: “I clearly drive her crazy, too. These are not tranquil times in the Meyer-Chabris household.”

Despite all the criticism, the book’s been a best seller. And that’s because Gladwell’s pity-the-billionaire theory has a lot of admirers. Slate’s neoliberal blogger Matty Yglesias loved the book. So did best-selling libertarian economist Dr. Tyler Cowen, of George Koch-Mason University. Here’s how he reviewed “David and Goliath”:

“Quite possibly it is Gladwell’s best book. His writing is better yet and also more consistently philosophical. . . . it so unambiguously improves the quality of the usual public debates, in addition to entertaining and inspiring and informing us, I am very happy to recommend it to anyone who might be tempted.”

There’s a reason why Dr. Cowen is so enthralled with with “David and Golaith.” He’s one of the most respected bagger economists alive today. And as such, Dr. Cowen believes that oligarchs get a bad rap. For instance: in his professional opinion, the current economic recession has hurt the rich more than any other class. Meanwhile it has been a downright godsend for America’s poor, allowing them to relax more and eat better.

“In any recession, the poor suffer the most pain… But it is less widely known that in the United States and other affluent countries, physical health seems to improve, on average, during a downturn. Sure, it’s stressful to miss a paycheck, but eliminating the stresses of a job may have some beneficial effects,” wrote Cowen in a 2009 New York Times op-ed. He pointed a few other reasons why economic depressions are great for the unemployed, including that they “spend less on alcohol and tobacco” and “have more time for exercise and sleep.” According to Mr. Cowen, it’s the rich who experience the greatest amount of suffering: “…it may well be the rich who lose the most in the current crisis. . . . We can expect a shift away from the lionizing of fancy restaurants, for example, and toward more use of public libraries.”

Just think of the three-star Michelin restaurants standing neglected, and all the luxury yachts abandoned at their slips! Think of all the fine sailing trips to the Bahamas and St. Kitts that never got underway! These wealthy folks really do suffer more than any of us poor and middle-bracket earners could ever know!

Now that’s a bagful of counterintuitive wisdom that Gladwell can get behind!

Gladwell argues that poverty can be great for you, but he’s no dope or simpleton. He understands that too much struggle and too much despair can be a bad thing. It can hold you back in your success and lead to what he calls an “undesirable difficulty.” One such undesirable difficulty: affirmative action.

Affirmative-action programs were designed to help African-American students attend good universities and add diversity to the student population, but Gladwell spends quite a lot of space arguing that these programs do the the opposite of what they were designed to achieve. That’s because elite universities are just too darn difficult for affirmative-action students. The kids can’t handle the workload, get discouraged and get poor grades. In the end, says Gladwell, affirmative-action students would be better served by attending less prestigious colleges where competition is not as intense. “That doesn’t mean affirmative action is wrong. It is something done with the best of intentions, and elite schools often have resources available to help poor students that other schools do not,” Gladwell writes. He then concludes: “I am now a good deal more skeptical of affirmative-action programs.”

So to sum up: Poverty and deprivation foster the good kind of struggle that helps you grow. But letting black kids attend universities that challenge them to think and do better…well, that’s just taking the struggle way too far.

In one of the weirder and more disturbing segments of the book, Gladwell tells the story of how the civil rights movement triumphed against the cops of Birmingham, Alabama, and won the hearts and minds of the American public. But in his neoliberal retelling, Martin Luther King and top civil rights organizers are transformed from moral and political activists into a bunch of scrappy PR guys who won because they ran a guerrilla marketing campaign that was better and smarter than that of their segregationist opponents.

To prove his point, Gladwell zeroes in on a famous photograph from a May 1963 demonstration in Birmingham that was brutally broken up by firehoses and police dogs. The picture shows a K-9 cop in a crisp uniform, dark aviator glasses and roundtop hat grabbing a lanky black student by the name of Walter Gadsden, while a snarling German shepherd prepares to maul the kid’s groin. The photo ran on the front page of the New York Times, and it was at the time so shocking and disturbing that President John F. Kennedy worried that it would help the Reds expand their influence. Gladwell credits the photo with helping turn public opinion in favor of the civil rights movement, and forcing the federal government into action…

That photo was clearly powerful and iconic, so much so that the vicious police German shepherd has been immortalized with a bronze statue standing in Birmingham today. But according to Gladwell, the picture was a PR gimmick and clever trick.

The way he tells it, conditions on the streets of Birmingham that day weren’t as violent as the people were led to believe. Sure, multiple news reports, eyewitness accounts and photographs showed police dogs attacking black protesters, biting them and ripping their clothes. Gladwell says photos can be deceptive. The truth is that Birmingham’s K-9 unit wasn’t known for violence, racism or bigotry. They were generally nice guys who just happened to be taking their pups out for a walk that day. If you analyze the photo carefully you can see that the police officer and his snarling German shepherd are not the aggressors. They are the victims of a raging black youth who decided to have a bit of fun by kicking the poor mutt in the jaw.

Here’s Gladwell:

“The officer in the picture is Dick Middleton. He was a modest and reserved man. . . The dog’s name is Leo. Now look at the faces of the black bystanders in the background. Shouldn’t they be surprised or horrified? They’re not. Next, look at the leash in Middleton’s hand. It’s taut, as if he’s trying to restrain Leo. And look at Gadsden’s left hand. He’s gripping Middleton on the forearm. Look at Gadsden’s left leg. He’s kicking Leo, isn’t he? . . . Gadsden wasn’t the martyr, passively leaning forward as if to say, ‘Take me, here I am.’ He’s steadying himself, with a hand on Middleton, so he can deliver a sharper blow. The word around the movement, afterward, was that he’d broken Leo’s jaw. Hudson’s photograph is not at all what the world thought it was.

In reality what happened that was that black protesters taunted the police and sparked the confrontation with the aim of getting some sympathetic press. There was no real bloodshed or violence, and the protest was actually fun and exciting for the black folks involved. But of course that’s not how it was reported by the national press hungry for racy headlines, which hyped the violence and compared Birmingham to apartheid South Africa. So in the end, the Americans were duped into supporting the civil rights movement by a crafty PR strategy and sympathetic news media.

It’s a very strange revisionist history that strips all the moral and political elements of the civil rights movement out of the story, reducing it to marketing strategy and tactics. But it’s also something potentially much more sinister: it promotes the idea that race relations in the South were not as bad as people believe, and that the civil rights movement was some sort of hoax.

Who believes in this conspiracy theory? Take neo-confederate Alabama governor George C. Wallace. He was convinced that the civil rights movement — and the Civil Rights Act that it inspired— was a diabolical plot to impose a tyrannical neo-reconstruction regime on Southern states by pinkos in the federal government. That view is still very much in circulation today. In fact, a decade before “David and Goliath” came out, extreme-libertarian website LewRockwell.com published a column by a fringe pro-slavery white supremacist named Gail Jarvis. The article described Birmingham’s protests in almost exactly the same way as Gladwell: that the liberal media elite colluded with uppity southern blacks to stage the civil rights hoax.

“I was a resident of Birmingham during the most turbulent part of the 1960s and I have always wanted to tell ‘the other side of the story.’

“I simply wanted to report what wasn’t reported and illustrate how activists, politicos and media collude to stage-manage the news.”

In addition to exposing the civil rights conspiracy, Jarvis wants to abolish the U.S. Department of Education because it’s engaged in “indoctrination and behavior modification.” He also thinks blacks were much better off as slaves: “it is a fact that [the] black male would have been much safer in the old Confederacy in the 19th [century].”

Now, if you’re asking yourself why Malcolm Gladwell, a celebrity journalist for the New Yorker magazine, is spiking his book with libertarian ideology, anti-union propaganda and weird borderline neo-confederate revisionism…well, then you clearly don’t know much about Malcolm Gladwell.

Malcolm Gladwell might be a bestselling author and a cult NPR thought-leader ranked as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine, but he’s got a long and sordid history that goes back to his days as a Reagan college conservative trained in the bowels of the corporate thinktank world. Specifically, he was indoctrinated at the National Journalism Center, a business-funded outfit designed to mold college kids into journalist-moles in order to combat the alleged “anti-business bias” of the news media. Philip Morris, one of its major supporters, said that the mission of the NJC was to “train budding journalists in free market political and economic principles.”

Over the years the National Journalism Center has produced hundreds of pro-business operatives and landed them in top-tier media jobs, and that includes Gladwell. Starting from the Washington Post and continuing into his current gig at The New Yorker, Gladwell’s used the pages of prominent media outlets to run cover for pharmaceutical companies, big tobacco, the health insurance industry and Wall Street fraudsters — all while pocketing serious cash as a sought-after corporate speaker. Just on his speaking racket alone, Gladwell earns at least $1 million a year from a diverse set of clients, including Philip Morris, Lehman Brothers, Microsoft, Bank of America, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the health insurance mega-lobby AHIP — many of the same companies he’s covered as a journalist.

It’s not widely known, but Philip Morris — which helped underwrite Gladwell’s early career as a journalist — loved his work so much that it named him in a confidential document as one of its top media assets, right along with Grover Norquist and Milton Friedman. Philip Morris’ top brass loved Gladwell’s first book, “The Tipping Point,” for its defense of the tobacco industry’s strategy of using advertising to lure young smokers. “I recommend you read (or have one of your minions submit a book report on) The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell . . . Beyond the piece on teen smoking, there is some interesting, possibly useful, information,” wrote Philip Morris exec Michael Fitzgibbon in an email to the company’s resident behavioral scientist.

Compared to his older work, there’s something disturbingly fatigued and pitiful about “David and Goliath.” The counterintuitive voodoo is duller, the counterfactual logic less crafty, the claims less daring…He’s clearly tired and believes his own inane bullshit even less than usual, but is still going through the motions. And why not? Gladwell’s done well for himself. He’s got three bestsellers, does script deals with Hollywood and is quite possibly the most famous essayist/journalist in America, a man who has the media hang on to his every word. Just last year, he bought his third million-dollar apartment in a New York’s West Village building where rent runs about $12,000 a month.

He’s made his millions, and now he’s got only one simple message: pity the rich.

The recent death of Andrea Dworkin didn’t even make the small print news in Russia. Feminism, at least the feminism of the kind Westerners take for granted, never caught on. Patronizing Westerners often see that as a sign that Russians are culturally too primitive. Russians, particularly Russian women — and particularly the Russian female intelligentsia — literally laugh and roll their eyes when you mention feminism of the American or West European brand. The reason is fairly simple: Russians haven’t quite learned the Western art of sloganeering for radical philosophy without meaning a word of what they say. A Russian woman would assume that if you’re a feminist, you’d actually have to live out the philosophy. In that sense, Andrea Dworkin was, in her own way, the only “Russian” feminist in America — and that is why she was so hated.

There was a strange undertone of smug satisfaction in the obituaries for Andrea Dworkin. The fact that she died relatively young, at 58, got a lot of space, followed by long descriptions of her obesity and the medical problems that supposedly resulted from it. In other words, she was fat, fat, fat. Case closed.

Then there were her stories of rape and abuse, which theLondon Times called “probability-defying.” American papers were more sly and cowardly, of course, but managed to imply that she was crazy as well as fat.

Feminists more comfortable in the meanstream had some very strange comments on her. Elaine Showalter, a sleek Princeton gender commissar, said, “I don’t wish Andrea Dworkin any harm, but I doubt that many women will get up at 4 am to watch her funeral.”

If you know anything about the verbal habits of upper-echelon academics, this is easy to translate: “Die, you bitch! Shut up and die so I can dance on your XL grave!”

I can’t recall so much barely-concealed delight in a celebrity death since Sam Kinison was wiped out by a couple of drunken kids in a pickup. He had it coming, the papers of record informed us; he too was fat and crazy and said things you’re not supposed to say about women.

Dworkin’s fatness and madness hardly disqualify her from intellectual distinction. If we excluded the fat and/or crazy from recent intellectual history, we’d be left with a very bland, Clinton-style consensus. And that, of course, is the goal, the point of these non sequiturs. They’re great for dismissing loud, unbroken voices. American academics have a habit of skipping to the slur with disconcerting speed, as I found out a couple of years ago when I mentioned my love for Wallace Stevens’ poetry to a Film professor. She winced, then said, “Wasn’t he a racist?”

She didn’t really know or care whether Stevens was a racist. As I realized later, that wince meant that she hadn’t read Stevens, didn’t want to be shown up and so had simply reached for the nearest available non sequitur. The notion that Stevens might be a racist AND a great poet, just as Dworkin might be a fat loon AND a crucial figure in feminist intellectual history, is simply beyond our Beige compatriots.

The habit has sifted so far down it’s affected the dialogue of disaster films, as I noticed while watching a bunch of unconvincingly attractive pseudo-nerds try to survive the fastest Ice Age ever in theDay After Tomorrow. There’s a great scene where a male and female nerd, stranded in the NYC Public Library, are arguing about whether to burn Beyond Good and Evil for warmth. The guy says, “Nietzsche was the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century!” The woman replies, “Nietzsche was a chauvinist who was in love with his sister!” It gave me a nightmare vision of what Lite Beer Super Bowl ads will be like in a few years, after everybody and their dog has been to grad school.

In the mating rituals of healthy people — that is, people who aren’t like Andrea Dworkin — these stylized collisions about ideology, usually personified by clashes about an historical figure, are usually no more than flirtation. That’s literally true in Day After Tomorrow; in the last scene of the movie, the male and female nerd are holding hands in the rescue helicopter, their Nietzsche dispute remembered, if at all, as the first scene of a third-hand screwball comedy they’re using as their romance template.

We’re supposed to know that you don’t take it seriously — you don’t live as you speak. What I revere about Dworkin is that she never realized that. Dworkin is hated so intensely simply because she accepted first-wave feminism fully. She blurted naively the implications of that ideology. And that appalled and embarrassed millions of smoother women, who liked the cool, fashionable tune feminism gave their bitching but had never had any intention of letting it get in the way of their romantic career plans.

I remember, ladies. I was there — at Berkeley in the 70s. And I was like Dworkin, a naive loser from a family which actually lived the ideology it claimed. Hers was the classic east-coast Jewish progressive tradition; mine was the most severe, self-flagellating brand of Irish Catholicism. The common denominator was the lack of compromise. Dworkin had a great line on this: “I don’t find compromise unacceptable, I find it incomprehensible.”

When she came of age, feminists like Steinem were speaking in the rhetoric of third-world national-liberation movements. Their case was simple and unassailable: women were oppressed, the biggest and most deeply, ubiquitously abused ‘minority’ on the planet. It was a view so simple that an intellect as subhuman as Yoko Ono was capable of absorbing it and translating it into “Woman is the nigger of the world.”

The difference is that Yoko would never have dreamed of letting her revelation get in the way of her relationship with that mangy meal ticket of hers, John. He was the reason she was able to get her 20-minute yodels on wax, baby. No way was she going to ditch him. Being the ultimate groupie, trading sex (let’s just move right along rather than get into what “sex” meant for John and Yoko) for money and fame had nothing to do with that line about women as niggers.

But there were people like me who’d been raised all wrong, who didn’t know any better, who actually believed that Steinem’s essays, which we had to read in our Norton Anthology, implied a code of conduct. And above all, that meant that man/woman mixing was going to come to a grinding halt. It was, according to the national-liberation model, fraternizing with the enemy. People were garroted for that kind of thing in places like Algeria, and Frantz Fanon had told us all how glorious it was that revolutionary piano wire was used to enforce this Spartan revolutionary separatism.

In my book Pleasant Hell I describe at length how I drifted sadly around the Berkeley campus in the 70s, convinced that everyone there was as bitterly lonely as I, and that this was simple historical necessity. And how shocked I was, happening to walk across campus at a later hour one night, to realize that men and women still fraternized with a vengeance once the sun went down. This may sound silly, but it was the biggest surprise of my life, and my introduction to the sleazy agility with which normal Americans dodge the inconvenient implications of the ideologies they mouth during the day.

Dworkin took the same Norton Anthology truisms to their obvious, clear, unbearable conclusions. If women were an oppressed group on the model of Fanon’s Algerians, Ho’s Vietnamese or Yoko’s “niggers,” then the steps to a revolutionary cleansing were simple:

1. The oppressed minority must re-learn history and re-evaluate society in order to see the horrors beneath the facade of normalcy.

In 70s campus feminism, this meant getting excited about footbinding, bar-b-que’d witches, and then acquiring a proper alienation from standard male-female interaction. In other words, learn all of the horrible oppressions males have unleashed upon women, and then cite the examples as reasons why you hate men and demand a fundamental change in the relationship.

This, comrades, was the tricky part. What Dworkin’s simple, loyal, canine mind could never grasp was that for a sly player like Steinem, this first stage of the process was fine, no matter how violent the denunciation of men and patriarchy became. Why not? As long as one didn’t let it interfere with one’s life (Steinem’s relationships with a series of male billionaires, for example), then Hell — the more violent the denunciation, the better!

Because — and this was another wrinkle I, like Dworkin, was far too naive to grasp — most meanstream men were in on the joke too. They were, in fact, more aware of what a joke it was than the young women students who in many cases, truly thought they believed their own clenched-fist chantings. The male response to 70s feminism was horror from old fools like Mailer, but a tolerant smile from the cool dudes whose job it was to disarm and fuck the feisty ladies. Their stance was a slightly more subtle, coy version of “you’re so cute when you’re mad, honey.”

2. The oppressed minority must mobilize, replacing its colonial relationship with the oppressors with ties to comrades among the oppressed.

What this meant for a “sane” or normal 70s woman depended on the degree of identification with the movement. At least, it meant lip service to a female version of “bros before ho’s” — high-profile socializing with female friends, during which male company was noisily disparaged. (This type of socializing, of course, was already a common habit of middle-class female socializing; giving it an ideological cast was simply a matter of replacing a few jargon terms.)

At most, it meant lip service of another sort: the big plunge into lesbianism. If you wanted to be a professional activist, you had to make the jump. A Women’s Studies lecturer I knew said a colleague once told her outright, “You’ll never have any street cred, Jennifer, because you don’t sleep with women.” For meanstreamers, the lesbian allegiance was all anyone could ever be asked to give; it was, in fact, more than most were willing to make. All you really needed to do was grit your tongue and give it a try — a rite of passage, a gesture of solidarity. After that you could get back to planning your wedding. That’s why the university lesbian interlude has been compressed into mock acronyms like BUG, “bisexual until graduation.”

But even full-time dyking around had little to do with the original model, the Fanon national-liberation rhetoric. He and Ho and Che didn’t advocate fucking other proletarians; they were in favor of wiping out the Other, the Oppressor. Fucking other revolutionaries was, if anything, a dubious way to spend time owed the Revolution.

Which brings us to Dworkin’s sexual orientation. If she was a lesbian, she was the worst I ever saw. And I should know — read my book. She called herself a lesbian, but then she also called herself a celibate. Even Morrissey would be scratching his head at that point. And besides, once the term acquired a positive connotation, everybody was a lesbian — Jane Fucking Austen was a card-carrying dyke, according to the ideologically-correct journals. Men at UC Berkeley who were cool but still wanted to fuck women took to calling themselves “male lesbians.” I don’t want to dwell on this; it wasn’t a great moment in American culture.

The point is that Dworkin never offered the world a significant other of the proper gender. Instead, she lived openly with…a man. I don’t mean to dwell on such sordid things, but it’s a matter of public record. The point was that they didn’t fuck.

And in this, once again she was a good orthodox Fanon/Guevara feminist. For the revolutionary, the point is not to screw in your own class but to stop getting it on with the enemy. And this was something America’s avid, proud young lesbians-until-that-first-big-job never, never promised to do. They’d made their point by licking girls; after that, they had every intention of fucking, or as Dworkin would insist, getting fucked by men.

For Fanon and the rest, any interaction between the Oppressor and the Oppressed is to the disadvantage of the Oppressed. That’s axiomatic. What that means in Dworkin’s simple, obvious reading of the Revolutionary Scriptures is that when men fuck women, it’s always an act of oppression.

That was where she went too far in the views of her more flexible colleagues. They didn’t like having their options reduced. That, in the view of an American striver, was the worst thing you could do to anybody.

Dworkin didn’t know a thing about her audience. Didn’t know they were talking career and fun when she was talking sacrifice, martyrdom. (It’s no accident her heroine was Joan of Arc. Dworkin was a Catholic without knowing it, an old-time Catholic who never suspected it of herself. She and J. K. Toole, another fat loser who died young, are the only Catholic writers to survive, for a while, in modern America.)

Dworkin maintained this strictly orthodox view in her most-hated book, Intercourse (1987), arguing that heterosexual intercourse was rape. Oh, and please, don’t tell me that’s not her argument. I not only read and reread that book but taught it to a group of horrified Berkeley students in 1990. That damn well is what she said. You could tell it by the expression on their little faces — a great moment!

Even the reviewers who praised Dworkin did it in ways intended to alert their readers that they were encountering a nut, someone who was to be admired rather than listened to. Intercourse was “daring,” “radical,” “outrageous” — in other words, beyond the pale. It was something to have on your shelf, or your reading list, as ballast, another sort of street cred. It was never meant to accuse women who fucked men of, to coin a phrase, sleeping with the enemy.

But that was exactly what Dworkin meant, and all she meant. It was so obvious; the real shock is that it took so long for someone in the women’s movement to say that and get noticed for it.

The last stage in Fanon’s and Guevara’s blueprint was the one that put Dworkin out of play forever:

4. Kill the oppressor.

That’s what the revolutionaries said, and they didn’t mean it figuratively. They meant get a fucking machete and kill a cop, take his gun and use that on as many of the oppressors as you can get. They were pretty damn clear on this, as clear as a Calvinist ruling out salvation by works. You could not overthrow the oppressor with harsh language, or the evil eye, or moving depictions of slum conditions. You had to kill the bastards. Are we clear?

And Dworkin, as loyal and dumb as the horse in Animal Farm, trotted along to this fatal fourth step — and found herself alone.

She said it, as usual, with simple clarity, in the language of Che Guevara. It must have amazed her that she even needed to say it; it had been so obvious from the start. Her pleas for resistance are couched in a wonderful diction, mixed of Catholic martyr-cult and Fanon’s call to jacquerie: “I’m asking you to give up your lies. I’m asking you to live your lives, honorably and with dignity. I’m asking you to fight. I am asking you to organize political support for women who kill men who have been hurting them…They resisted a domination that they were expected to accept. They stand there in jail for us, for every one of us who got away without having to pull the trigger.”

In the end, the most remarkable thing about Dworkin is that there was only one of her. Hundreds of millions of women more sly, raised with the notion of compromise and an immunity to ideology, scrambled away from the inconvenient implications of liberation rhetoric. She alone stood their on her famously arthritic knees, doing her simple best to fight the jihad she’d been fool enough to believe would actually take place.

What if they held a war and only one fat lady sang? You don’t need to ask; you’ve lived through it.

FRESNO, CA — Name a country that lost at least two thirds of its male population fighting three countries at once, and nearly managed to beat all three before being ground down and damn near wiped out. Second clue: this happened during the second-bloodiest war ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

Whatever country you nominated, I bet it wasn’t Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-1870. To most war buffs the War of the Triple Alliance rates a big shrug, and Paraguay is more like a punchline than a country, a tiny landlocked South American sweatbox full of Nazi escapees creaking around cursing arthritis and the T-34. Paraguay is like a country by Mel Brooks.

But Paraguay is the correct answer, and I’m here to give the place its long overdue due. By the way, if you’re wondering what the first-bloodiest war in the Americas was, shame on you! Blue and Gray ring any bells? Gettysburg? America’s still got #1 all locked up, thanks to the Civil War, just possibly the greatest war ever. More than 600,000 dead, and most of them soldiers who died honorably, in open battle. Until you’ve been studying real war for a few years, you don’t realize how rare that kind of high, clean body count is. Like I’ve said before, most conflict is massacre and counter-massacre. Battles are rare.

And that reminds me, I have to quibble with these rankings, even though I feel dirty saying anything that could lower the ranking of our Civil War. What worries me is nobody seems to count the Spanish-vs-Aztec or Spanish-vs-Inca wars in the rankings. Nobody’s very sure how many people died in Mexico, but the simplest answer is “Most of ’em,” and since the Inca have been fighting the Spanish for 500 years at last count, they deserve an entry in the numbers game too.

But let’s say we rule out those conquistador wars, and stick to more standard nation-vs-nation fights; you still have to wonder why this amazing War of the Triple Alliance doesn’t get any publicity. Basically the answer is because the whole thing is a downer. The countries that fought it are downers: Who wants to think about Argentina if they don’t have to? And Uruguay, I had to do a report on Uruguay in fifth grade, picked it because nobody else was going to, started out rooting for it as El Underdog, but by the end I decided it deserved to be just Uruguay. I mean, being a suburb of Argentina, the East St. Louis to Buenos Aires—what could be more pathetic? If only I’d picked the other Guay! Then I’d have changed my whole take on the continent a lot sooner.

Then there’s the fact that it was a real stupid war. One of the best accounts of the whole thing is titled “El Guerro el Mas Stupido.” Which is why I’m not going to waste much time on how it got started. The official reason is that Brazil and Argentina were messing with Uruguayan politics and when the Uruguayan minority party, the Blancos, asked their Paraguay comrades upriver for help, and Paraguay was too macho to say no. The real reason it got started is a lot simpler: because 19th-century nations pumped more testosterone than all the steroid casualties at your gym put together, and when dudes like that spent money on cute Zouave uniforms and horses (cavalry was incredibly expensive) and flags, they wanted their money’s worth. 19th-century war junkies—and that was every man who could read in those better days—weren’t as lame as us 21st-century. taxpayers who don’t even demand that SAC vaporize Tehran just so we can see that those H-bombs we paid for actually work. Your average Victorian newspaper junkie wanted flowery detailed battle reports about their friends and relatives getting filled full of glorious grapeshot. And plenty of illustrations of hussars being shot out of the saddle. It’s the same answer as the old joke about why dogs lick their own balls: “Because they can.”

Then there’s the crummy timing. It’s hard for any American to focus on some foreign war that started in 1864. We have our own war, maybe the best ever, to study up on.

But credit where it’s due, boys: Paraguay, of all people, took on Brazil and Uruguay, then Argentina, and kicked all their asses until it lost a big naval battle—which you can forgive pretty easily when you consider that Paraguay has no coastline. That’s the one thing it has in common with my other favorite South American country, Bolivia. Losing its coast broke Bolivia’s big oxygen-rich high-altitude heart, but Paraguay had it worse: never had a coastline to begin with. Bolivia moans “Queremos nuestro mar”; Paraguay goes, “Cual mar?” It’s jammed like a fat tampon way up the estuary of the Rio de la Plata, and all it has to float around on is a big dirty jungle river, the Parana.

The one good thing about not having a coast is you can keep to yourself, get all weird, and from the start Paraguay rolled with the isolation, went with it big-time. To reach the place you had to cross disgusting malaria swamps or deserts or jungles with spiders the size of laptops, or all of the above. So it was a unique breed of Spaniard who came calling on the Guarani, the big Indian tribe in those parts. They were Jesuits, genuine religious fanatics, and right from the start they decided their little commune was going to be different from the get-rich-quick strip mines their conquistador pals had set up in the rest of Latin America.

For generations these Jesuits ran Paraguay like one of Oprah’s charity schools, only bigger and without the horny dyke teachers buying sex from the pupils. No whips, no mass burnings, none of what your average conquistador considered good healthy fun. The Jesuits in those days were a hardcore outfit, like commissars in the 1930s, and they tried like hell to turn the Guarani into a country of pious, obedient little nation-state builders: gave them universal education, everything owned in common (some kind of Catholic communism, an idea I don’t get at all) and all that “respect for local customs” business that got popular a couple hundred years later. By the time the Jesuits got booted out of Paraguay by the Spaniards around the time of the American Revolution, they’d done some weird transformation of the locals. Naturally, after the Spanish retook control, Paraguay got a lot more like your typical Spanish colony—you know, rape, forced labor, some nice looking-churches built out of Indian bones—but the Guarani were different.

There was a 19th-c. dictator of Paraguay who was so honest he wouldn’t even accept his salary, returned every penny to the treasury. You get a lot of dictators south of the border, but not the kind that hand back money. That was Paraguay: crazy, but in a pretty impressive way. Even the local Indians, the Guarnai, had been warped in a good way by their time in the Jesuits’ commune; they had pride and they mixed with the whites on something kind of close to equal terms. That made them natural recruits for an effective army, and more than a match for the average Latin conscript, the kind of cannon fodder Santa Ana spent at the Alamo. The Paraguayans believed in their country, fought by choice, and even had a bigger army than their three opponents’ armies put together: at the start of the war in1864, Paraguay had 50,000 men in uniform, whereas Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay combined only had about half that.

Paraguay was ruled by the Lopez family, and they ran the place like a small business, keeping the money but investing most of it back into growing the place. And the kind of growth that mostly interested the Lopezes was military. Like Japan, another 19th-century up-and-comer, Paraguay spent a lot of foreign exchange on hiring the best military technicians and advisers Europe had to sell. And they did it smart, too, putting money into basic infrastructure like telephone lines and rail track, not just chrome bayonets.

If you’re good with numbers, you may be wondering how a war fought between fairly small forces like these could come close to the US Civil War in total death toll. The answer’s simple: the war started out semi-clean, but it didn’t stay that way, and most of the dead were Paraguayan civvies.

Paraguay’s men fought like jaguars while they lasted, and when they were all dead, Paraguay’s women and children fought on. Until they were dead, too. Total war doesn’t always start out no-mercy, kill-em-all; but when you’re fighting a small, tough country that just won’t give up, sooner or later you’re either going to either give up or resort to massacre.

That’s what Sherman was saying with that “War is Hell” comment that’s always being misquoted. He meant it SHOULD be, and he proceeded to show Georgia and the Carolinas how it’s done. He figured it was the only way to slap a country as tough and crazy as the Confederacy into surrender. You may remember we had a similar problem with a little place called Imperial Japan, and had to slap them around a little rough, too. Of course the official story with Sherman is that he burned houses and crops but didn’t actually take it to mass rape and murder. Me, I’ve always had my doubts about that. You take a bunch of young male chimps, put ’em in uniform, and tell them it’s open season on the enemy, I can’t really see them settling for the livestock when the lady of the house is so durn cute with that s’uthin drawl an’ awl. And once they’re done with her, it’s standard practice to quiet her up, her and anybody else in the house, with bayonets.

But then that’s me and people are always telling me I’m “cynical,” whatever that means. (I mean, either you’re right or you’re wrong; and if you’re right, how is that “cynical”?) So let’s say for the moment that Sherman’s boys didn’t massacre. Well, they were the exception, because that’s how total war is done, and that’s sure as hell how it was done in the later stages of the war against Paraguay.

Before we get down to the details, I want a moment of respect, or maybe “cynical” chuckles, at how hard it must be to be a Paraguayan. All that suffering and heroic exploits and slaughtered ancestors and nobody except a few nationalist fanatics in Brazil and Argentina even know about it. Paraguay has to win as the Rodrigo Dangerfield of heroic countries: no respecto.

Well, I’m here to fix that. Paraguay struck first, declaring war on Brazil in December 1864—countries used to do that, you know, “declare war”—one of those quaint old customs like high collars—and to prove they meant it, Lopez himself led the Paraguayan Army north into the Mato Grosso. This was a nasty tract of Brazil even by Brazilian standards, a low-rent jungle northeast of Paraguay. You don’t have to be a genius on the Subotai or Belisarius level to figure that isolation is an advantage on defense but a huge liability on offense, so the Paraguayans were more brave than smart to start with an invasion. But that’s them all over: as brave and stupid as a pitbull on the freeway.

They were lucky to be invading Brazil, because Brazil had nothing whatsoever in the area. This was one of the most remote parts of the country, and it took months to get troops down from the populated parts of Brazil to face the Paraguayans. And when the Brazilians did drag their sorry asses into battle, they made fools of themselves. Brazil has always been one of those places that specialize in internal security rather than nation-vs-nation fighting. If you want some annoying shoeshine kid or street urchin shot and dumped in a swamp, hire a Brazilian cop. Job’s as good as done. But actual fighting, against people who are armed and expecting trouble? That ain’t the Brazilian way.

Unlike the Confederacy, the other biggest slave-based economy in the Americas, the Brazilian elite didn’t like to fight. And unlike the Confederates, they sent their black slaves to do it for them. Anybody who could afford it just sent a few black slaves. And funny thing, the slaves weren’t that great troops. Slaves fight pretty well sometimes, which is one of the depressing features of history most people don’t like to think about—the way so many slaves are eager to die for Massa—but these must’ve been your smarter slaves, because they weren’t into it at all. The Paraguayans rolled over them every time they met, and that was usually by accident if the Brazilian rank-and-file had anything to say about it.

The Brazilian Army was the real Mel Brooks character in this screenplay: they didn’t manage to march to the Paraguayan frontier until 1867, and by the time they got there, their grand expeditionary force had been hacked away by malaria and other bug-borne killers to about 1500 men. They fought one battle against the first Paraguayan force they met—I mean, a shame to come all that way and not come back with even one decent war story—despite the fact that the Paraguayans had gotten bored waiting in the jungle for their Brazilian opponents to show. When the grand Brazilian expedition finally met a small force of Paraguayan cavalry at Laguna, they instantly fled back to the plantation, to resume the wonderful life of being slaves in the sugarcane fields in dear old Brazil.

So far Paraguay was winning and looking good doing it. But the trouble with being one of these undersized super-countries is that early victories go to your head and you start thinking you can take on a whole army, like Uma Thurmann with her Ginzu knife in Tokyo. Paraguay was as high on victory as Germany in 1941, so tweaked on war that in March 1865 the Lopez family decided to take on another country: Argentina. And here again it was like a midget version of the European War of 1939-1945: at first the Paraguayans scored miraculous, against-the-odds victories, one after the other. They took the Argentine province of Corrientes. This wasn’t an outback like Mato Grosso, but important and basic Argentine land. Except now it was Paraguay’s land, and Lopez was determined to keep marching toward blue water, and win his homeland a piece of the coastal pie he’d call “Greater Paraguay.”

Man, there’s nothing more deadly than these “Greater Whatever” plans. If your country starts talking like that, you better start putting your assets into offshore havens, because church is about out. The Paraguayans were about to learn that modern war puts logistical strength and flexibility above sheer guts. The same lesson the Confederacy and the Reich and the Imperial Japanese learned, and in the same hard way.

See, Brazil’s army might be useless but they had a navy, and a pretty decent one. In that part of South America 140 years ago, there were no roads to speak of; you got around by river. The Brazilian navy was twice the size of Paraguay’s and unlike the army was considered a respectably place to work if you were part of the white Brazilian elite. So it had decent training, funding, and morale, unlike the army.

In 1865, the same year Grant finally ground down Lee, the Brazilian navy beat the Paraguayan navy in the river battle of Riachuelo. The Paraguayan navy fought as well as you’d expect, but it was outgunned twice over, and numbers do tell when both sides have decent morale.

That battle was a lot like the Union victory at Vicksburg (but a lot faster); it meant that the enemy heartland was opened up to grinding, a war of attrition, where money, industrial base and coast control can be sure of beating sheer courage over time. In that way, this war was a lot like our Civil War: key river naval battle leads to Phase Two, Total War to destroy enemy civilian morale.

Like the Army of Northern Virginia, the Paraguayans held the invaders at bay longer than any sane military man could have predicted. For two years, from 1866-1868, the Paraguayan forts at the junction of the Paraguay and Parana, the two big rivers, kept the foreigners out. But like Lee or, say, Phyrrus, the Paraguayans, with a total population of maybe 1.5 million, couldn’t afford this kind of bravery. It was national suicide: at the battle of Tuyuti in 1866, they not only lost control of the field but lost more men in a few hours than they’ve been able to replace in a century.

There was plenty of room for Paraguay to show how heroic it was, in brave last stands nobody has ever heard of, like—let’s see if I can even spell this right—Curupaity, where a small garrison held off a force of 25,000 Argentines and Brazilians, killing an incredible 5000 attackers in one day.

But like the Union, the Brazilians were slowly learning to dump their incompetent commanders and develop a decent health service and supply corps. Over time, that made sure they’d win, especially with naval control of the rivers. The Paraguayans still fought smart, but sometimes the new breed of Brazilian commanders fought smart now too. Like the way the new Brazilian general Caxias, who’d been ordered to attack 18,000 Paraguayans who’d fortified Piquissiri, bypassed the strong point, mopped up the territory it was meant to block off from the enemy, then took it from the rear.

By 1869 it was as hard to find an able-bodied Paraguayan male as it was to find a white Virginian who could walk without crutches. The Brazilian/Argentine/Uruguayan army occupied the Paraguayan capital, Asuncion, and in a real smart, 20th-c. style move, set up a puppet local government. Lopez, the Paraguayan leader, fled to the hills. He still had the support of the people, and tried to start a guerrilla war…but the Brazilians showed they understood Maoist theory before Mao was even born. Mao said the people are the water, and the guerrillas are the fish who swim in it. The Brazilians just drained the pond the old-fashioned way: by killing every Paraguayan they came across. This is the phase of war where even lousy troops can look good: bayoneting kids and burning houses. And this is when Paraguay’s children proved themselves in a useless cause, like those Hitlerjugend junior high kids who actually held off the Red Army outside Berlin for a few weeks. At the battle—if you can call it that—of Acosta Nu, a force of 3500 Paraguayan children and a few women fought against 20,000– yes, twenty thousand!—invaders… until they were overwhelmed.

But here again, war doesn’t necessarily reward bravery, especially bravery in a lost cause. Paraguay ended the war a total ruin, destroyed more thoroughly than the Confederacy, post-Hitler Germany, or Japan. If you try to give an estimate of the death toll among Paraguayans, you just wind up starting another war—an online war. But the estimates start at about half the population. Half. Paraguay went from a contender, a little crazy brave Spanish-speaking Prussia, to a punchline. Worse yet, the country that benefited the most was… Argentina. I mean, damn.

This article first appeared in The eXile on December 26, 2007

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. You can read his newest dispatches and articles at the NSFWCorp (www.nsfwcorp.com).

Backed by an army of punked-out teens, cult Russian novelist Eduard Limonov dedicated himself to taking on Vladimir Putin. Will death threats and nutty supermodels derail his democratic revolution?

It’s 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning in June when I arrive at the home of Russian opposition leader Eduard Limonov. It’s shaping up to be another grimy, humid summer day in Moscow. We need to get an early start if we’re going to make our flight to St. Petersburg, where Garry Kasparov, the chess legend who recently joined the political fray, and Limonov, Russia’s most infamous literary celebrity, are planning to lead a protest against the country’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin. Together the two head up a ragtag coalition of anti-Kremlin parties known as Other Russia.

The last two times Limonov went to St. Petersburg, things got ugly. In April, an Other Russia protest ended with cops attacking throngs of marchers while Putin’s paramilitary goons hunted down and detained Limonov and then brutally stomped his bodyguards. Six weeks before that, another anti-Kremlin rally in Russia’s “second city” devolved into truncheon thrashings and unlawful arrests. Limonov was taken into custody in an operation that looked like something out of the Peloponnesian War: Black-clad Kremlin shock troops charged in formation into a phalanx of Limonov supporters, mercilessly beating anyone in their path until they reached their target.

Limonov buzzes me into his building. I climb up a couple flights of stairs, and then wait while he looks out at me through the peephole of his black steel door. We’ve known each other for more than a decade, during which he has been a controversial and high-profile columnist for the English-language alternative newspaper I run in Moscow, the eXile. I’m no threat, but Limonov is one of the most marked men in Russia today, and if any of his enemies ever decide to whack him, chances are they’ll do it right here. A wide array of politicians, journalists, and businessmen have been gunned down while entering or leaving their apartments or offices—including the high-profile cases of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov. The only time I’ve ever seen Limonov betray something like hunted mammalian unease is when he enters the invisible red zone outside his front door—which is why he almost never travels without bodyguards.

He unlocks a series of dead bolts and opens the door. “Come in,” he says, then quickly shuts it behind me. His muscle hasn’t arrived yet.

The writer, now 65, is sharp-featured, lean, and energetic. With his flamboyant haircut and Trotsky-like goatee, he looks like an aging Marxist rock star. Since returning to Russia in 1992, after living in exile in France and the United States for nearly two decades, he has been pursuing his lifelong fascination with revolutionary politics. In 1993, he founded the National Bolshevik Party, which encompasses a strange and evolving mixture of nationalism, left-wing economics, punk-rock aesthetics, and a constant desire to shock. Politics has always been a blood sport in Russia, and ever since he started the party, Limonov has lived under threat. He spent two years in jail during Putin’s first term in office.

But things didn’t get really bad until a little over two years ago, when a gang of youths went after his followers with baseball bats, cracking skulls, ribs, and limbs. Some of the perpetrators later caught by local cops were wearing T-shirts from the Kremlin youth organization Nashi, or “Ours.”

A few of Limonov’s more vocal supporters in the Russian provinces have died under mysterious, violent circumstances. Not so long ago, a well-connected friend warned me to stay away from him if I didn’t want something bad to happen to me. (I decided to take my chances.)

This year, the writer has received his two most serious death threats to date. One was passed on by a powerful Duma deputy closely tied to the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB and the beast that spawned Putin. The other came from former FSB operative Andrei Lugovoi, Scotland Yard’s chief suspect in the high-profile polonium poisoning of Putin foe Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. At a press conference last spring in Moscow, Lugovoi—who, like a Russian O.J., has been basking in his guilty-’n'-gettin’-away-with-it fame—told reporters, “I think something is being prepared for [Limonov].” Lugovoi then claimed that the murder plot was a clever ruse by exiled billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky, intended to discredit President Putin.

The threat simply added to the general sense in Russia that anyone who opposes Putin should expect to be the target of violence or persecution. At this point the serious competition has been jailed, exiled, or otherwise brought to heel, and Putin’s hold on political power appears to be absolute. While he’s obliged by Russian law to step down in March after his second term ends, Putin has found a way to circumvent his term limit and retain power. He anointed a successor, Dmitry Medvedev, as his proxy in the country’s upcoming presidential elections. Now Putin will slide into the prime minister’s chair with Medvedev as his executive puppet. “He clearly will be supreme leader, maybe leader for life,” declared a Time editor shortly after the magazine named Putin Person of the Year for 2007. The only glimmer of popular opposition against the increasingly authoritarian regime is a handful of eccentric radicals like Limonov and Kasparov. That they’re still around suggests the Kremlin considers them a safer brand of adversary than Berezovsky or Yukos oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly one of the world’s richest men, who today sits in a Siberian prison on various charges, including tax evasion.

The Kremlin may be right about Kasparov—after all, the former world chess champion has been relentlessly building a future for himself and his family (including his American-born child) in the United States, where a series of speaking gigs have helped make him the biggest stateside Russian sensation since Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s Limonov who is the real wildcard. His organization provides the bodies in the Other Russia coalition. And the last time he was jailed for his political activities, he emerged stronger and more determined than ever in his opposition to Putin.

As we stand in the kitchen and wait for his bodyguards to arrive, Limonov runs through the day’s itinerary: He, Kasparov, and their respective entourages are supposed to convene at Mayakovsky Square and then caravan to Sheremetyevo airport to fly to St. Petersburg. The two opposition leaders always try to travel together to rallies so that one or the other isn’t individually detained—appearing in tandem at Other Russia events is key to keeping the coalition energized and unified. Everywhere they go, they are trailed by intelligence agents, who no longer even bother to be discreet.

At an opposition protest in the capital last spring, security forces managed to physically separate the two men, which created disarray among the protesters. In the melee, Kasparov was detained and thrown in jail while Limonov slipped away and did an end-run around the police with an all-night drive on back roads, arriving in St. Petersburg in time for the next rally, where he was then also detained. (Unexpectedly, though, having Limonov held in St. Petersburg and Kasparov in Moscow became a major publicity boon for Other Russia.)

“What do you think the authorities have planned for you today?” I ask him as he paces around his modest kitchen. The room is austere and clean, with simple Brezhnev-era furnishings and an old bathtub just a few feet from the stove. A wooden plank laid widthwise across it holds his soap, shampoo, and toothbrush. It seems to reflect not only Limonov’s contempt for middle-class consumerism and clutter, but also his Spartan, disciplined mentality, which has kept him focused on his impossible, lifelong dream: to lead a political revolution in Russia. Only a small-minded sucker would waste his money on some built-in IKEA kitchen—junk for “the goat herd,” as Limonov calls the bourgeoisie in an early autobiographical novel, Memoir of a Russian Punk.

“I have no idea what will happen today,” he replies. “Anyway, I don’t give a shit. It’s a waste of time trying to guess what the Kremlin has planned for us. We have to worry about our own plans for ourselves.” The very notion that he should expend energy guessing what his Kremlin foes are thinking irritates Limonov on some basic level. It implies subservience. “They may do what they did a few weeks ago, this ‘soft authoritarianism’ bullshit, and not let us go to Petersburg.”

Three weeks earlier, Kasparov, Limonov, their aides, and about a dozen Western journalists, including myself, were detained at Sheremetyevo. We were supposed to fly to Samara for a protest rally, but the woman at the Aeroflot check-in desk claimed that everyone’s tickets were possibly counterfeit, so we all had to stick around for questioning. Kasparov pounced on her, relentlessly dissecting her claim. A border guard relieved her, but the poor bastard quickly regretted it: Kasparov was immediately on him, too—something like that face-sucking creature in Alien. The chess champion scoffed, threw up his hands, and mocked the man. “You’re not serious! You can’t be! It’s shameful, a parody, theater of the absurd! You’re breaking the law! Do you realize that you, a law enforcement official, are breaking your own laws? It’s just unbelievable!” Kasparov then turned to a captain in Russia’s Ministry of the Interior who had joined the fray: “Bring my passport back to me. You have no right! Bring me my passport!”

Limonov, meanwhile, withdrew to the other side of the airport lobby with his bodyguards, where they squatted Central Asian style, looking around with bored and contemptuous expressions. The writer and his crew were dressed in black, while Kasparov wore dowdy blue jeans, a baseball cap, and a tan, Eddie Bauer–style windbreaker. He took a series of cell phone calls from the media and continued his arguments with the authorities, without missing a beat.

“You don’t want to bitch everyone out, the way Garry is?” I asked, as Kasparov demanded to see the identification of one of the agents, and then let out a savage laugh.

“You know, I have 13 years’ political experience,” Limonov said, smiling. “I don’t give a fuck about these schmucks. I don’t get so excited about little things as I used to. I’ll answer their questions, yes, yes, and then get the hell out of here. This isn’t my style.”

We were detained until the last plane for Samara took off, ensuring that Kasparov and Limonov would miss the protest rally. Putin was in Samara that day, hosting German chancellor Angela Merkel. It was supposed to be a routine photo op, but when news hit that the Other Russia leaders had been barred from coming, Merkel went about as ballistic as a dour middle-age German bureaucrat possibly can. At their joint news conference, she scolded Putin: “I can understand if you arrest people throwing stones or threatening the right of the state to enforce order … But it is altogether a different thing if you hold people up on the way to a demonstration.”

Putin didn’t fancy being lectured and struck back with a list of countercomplaints, leading the BBC to conclude that Russian–EU relations had “reached a new low.”

The discord was another publicity coup for the opposition. When we finally left the airport, a mob of mostly foreign reporters, television crews, and photographers swarmed Kasparov, while Limonov slipped away with his bodyguards. “Garry has the patience for their idiotic questions, which is good for me,” he said, an inkling of a smile on his face. “Anyway, the Western journalists are mostly afraid of me.”

Before his career in politics forced him to adopt disciplined habits, Limonov led a wild, decadent existence—much of which became the raw material for his early novels and poems. He hung out with rock icons like Marky Ramone and punk legend Richard Hell, and the last three of his four wives have been stars in their own right.

“I think this life he lives now, spending so much time locked inside his apartment or in meetings, causes Limonov some pain,” says Thierry Marignac, a French author who was one of Limonov’s closest friends while Limonov was living in exile in Paris in the ’80s. “He was very social and he liked partying. He saw himself as a kind of Elvis Presley of poetry.”

Limonov wrote the first sexually explicit, brutally amoral novels that the Russian language had ever seen. His debut effort, It’s Me, Eddie—which has been compared to the work of Henry Miller by some critics—was banned by the Soviet government but has sold more than a million copies in Russia since it was published there. The book chronicled his breakup with his wife Elena, a fashion model who was also a flamboyant luminary in Moscow’s beau monde. They moved to New York in 1975, where she ditched him for an Italian count. Limonov went on welfare, drank prodigiously, and—if his autobiographical novel is to be believed—had sex with anyone he could, sampling the gamut from beautiful young women to scabrous homeless guys. He poured his bitterness against Americans into the book: “I scorn you because you lead dull lives, sell yourselves into the slavery of work, because of your vulgar plaid pants, because you make money and have never seen the world. You’re shit!” He also raged against the West’s propaganda about its freedoms: “They’ve got no freedom here, just try to say anything bold at work … You’re out on your ear.”

Limonov crawled out of obscurity after his novels became celebrated in France in the years that followed. Leveraging his return to fame, he married another larger-than-life Russian model, Natalya Medvedeva, a strikingly tall, sharp-boned woman built like a praying mantis. (If you’ve seen the cover of the first Cars album, then you’ve seen Natalya Medvedeva; she also posed for Playboy.) Together, they moved to Paris and had a famously cruel, public relationship, replete with affairs and scandal.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the couple moved home so Limonov could pursue his dream of getting involved in Russian politics. Limonov’s vision for his life was something on the order of a modern Lord Byron: a writer who undertakes political projects so grand and strange that they would seem to have sprung from the pages of a novel (or an epic poem, in the case of Byron, who led a rebel army and became a national hero in the Greek War of Independence). But Medvedeva’s hard-partying lifestyle didn’t jibe with his new ambitions, and they split up in 1994. She hooked up with a famous metal guitarist and later died of an apparent drug overdose, while Limonov began a series of affairs with ever-younger fans of his bad-boy politics and art.

The writer’s youthful paramours in those years often shaved their heads as a show of loyalty to the dark prince of Russia’s underground. Before he was jailed by Putin in 2001—convicted on a weapons charge related to a bizarre scheme to raise a private army and invade Kazakhstan—his last girlfriend had been a feral teenage punk named Nastya. She was bald and uncontrollable and enjoyed vandalizing his apartment, which was a source of great amusement to him. But after his release from prison in 2003 transformed Limonov into an opposition icon, he lost interest in adolescent lovers.

In 2006, at age 63, he married his fourth wife, Ekaterina Volkova, then a 31-year-old pinup model and Russian television star who bears a much-noted resemblance to Angelina Jolie. She shaved her head and bore him his first child—a son.

She is now pregnant again, a development that seems to have saved the couple’s marriage. “I got sick of everything,” Limonov tells me, recalling a recent fight with Volkova that ended with a short separation. “I threw my vodka glass at her, and it almost hit my mother-in-law in the head. Anyway, a couple of weeks later, I find out that she is pregnant with my second child, so that brought us back together again.”

In late September, the Other Russia coalition holds their national convention in a renovated theater hall in Izmailovsky Park, on Moscow’s eastern fringe, to nominate a presidential candidate for the upcoming election. Their choice will stand zero chance of winning, but will be symbolically important in flying the flag of opposition to the Kremlin’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Delegates come from all over the country and are an eclectic mix: Kasparov-allied liberal intelligentsia mingling with hardcore nationalists, broke war veterans, and—most of all—droves of Limonov’s punk-rock kids. Though Kasparov is eventually named the presidential candidate, he actually has relatively few supporters in the hall. Instead, his nomination comes as the result of an agreement worked out with Limonov, whose followers could swing the vote in any direction.

Kasparov, whose name is far better known in the West than Limonov’s, hit international democracy-activist superstardom this year. Not only is he the neocons’ Nelson Mandela (the Wall Street Journal‘s nutty op-ed page has named him contributing editor), but American liberals love him for his wit and charm, and because he criticized the Bush administration for backtracking on promoting democracy in Russia.

But in reality, Limonov provides most of the organizational force behind Other Russia: His 15,000 or so loyalists consist largely of young artists, intellectuals, skinheads, anarchists, and other outsiders. In the past, the group incorporated fascist and ultranationalist elements into both its platform and presentation, and embraced some questionable allies—one of Limonov’s most despicable episodes came during the Balkan conflict when he fired automatic weapons down on the city of Sarajevo from a mountain encampment shared with accused Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic. But the party now hews to a straight leftist political line on most issues, playing down its aggressively nationalistic stances. Putin’s cynical use of nationalist rhetoric to manipulate public sentiment was partly responsible for the shift. “We live in a truly despotic regime,” Limonov says. “This government is cruel to the poor and the vulnerable. Its only ideology is nationalism. Our left-wing views are much closer to those of the masses. If we were allowed to operate in a free society, I am sure that we would become the most popular party.”

But what seems to animate Limonov’s legions of loyal followers most is his philosophy of “Russian Maximalism”: going for broke to free oneself and one’s nation from all forms of oppression. For the young punks, this means raging not only at the Kremlin, but also at the out-of-control consumerism that has taken root in this newly rich nation. You can see their fanatical enthusiasm in their suicidal political stunts, like the time they egged a prime minister while he was voting in an election, or when they took over the Health Ministry office and trashed portraits of Putin until FSB commandos arrived and kicked the shit out of them. Hundreds of them have seen the inside of Russia’s jails.

Limonov’s opposition to Putin is not new. When Putin took power in late 1999, the writer became one of his earliest and fiercest critics. “We were practically the only group to oppose him from the start,” he says. “Why would I support this KGB schmuck who weaseled his way into power? It was obvious for us, but at the time, many liberals supported him.” Within two years Limonov was in jail and being vilified on state television. The state’s case grew out of a series of unbylined articles in Limonov’s party newspaper advocating occupation of northern Kazakhstan with a private army to set up an ultranationalist Russian state.

In the summer of 2003, he was unexpectedly paroled, thanks to the intervention of some powerful friends in parliament. Shortly after his release, my mobile phone rang: “Mark! It’s Eduard! I’m out of that fucking prison and back in Moscow. So let’s meet! It’s been a long time!” He was as cheerful as ever and full of fighting energy—as if he hadn’t been stuck inside one of Russia’s infamous overcrowded, tuberculosis-infested cells for two and a half years. During his incarceration, he had written eight books.

His release was an important moment for Russia’s underground opposition. He’d fought the czar and won. The National Bolshevik Party’s ranks suddenly swelled with thousands of young followers, across Russia’s 11 time zones. To them, Limonov was a real-life Fight Club rebel, always ready to put everything on the line. Violence and incarceration seemed only to fuel his sense of purpose.

But this morning, in June, bound for St. Petersburg, everyone is nervous as we climb into a black Volga and head off toward Mayakovsky Square. Limonov is sandwiched between two hefty bodyguards in the backseat, while I ride shotgun. At 7 a.m., we link up with Kasparov and his entourage, who are rolling in expensive white SUVs. The traffic looks bad and the chess champ wonders aloud whether it’s a sign—or even a Kremlin plot to make us miss the plane. But there will be nothing like that. This time, I’m the only one detained, while the two leaders of Other Russia are waved onto the airplane with their bodyguards, a film crew from 60 Minutes trailing behind. (They’re working on a profile of Kasparov, which in its final form will not even mention Limonov.) In the end, I’m allowed to join them just minutes before the plane takes off.

The protest in St. Petersburg goes off without incident. When the speeches and chants are finished, there’s a palpable sense of letdown. Democracy protests are supposed to lead to evermore dramatic confrontations with authorities—culminating either in martial law or popular revolution. But in Russia’s case, the dynamics have already changed too much, and that narrative simply doesn’t fit.

Kasparov’s rhetoric about a Ronald Reagan–inspired liberal revolution seems downright silly in a nation where Putin enjoys more than 70 percent approval and anti-Americanism and anti-liberalism run deep. His candidacy for president will fall apart in December 2007, when the Kremlin requires that Other Russia hold an officially sanctioned nomination in a large public event hall—an impossible requirement since the owners of every such facility in Moscow are too frightened to rent to the party.

Limonov, by contrast, has always shown his mettle as a political activist by quickly adjusting to real-world circumstances.

Over the course of several conversations in November and December, he describes to me an incredibly audacious and media-savvy scheme to expose Putin and Russia’s subordinate parliament. It’s the kind of stunt that will make the capillaries in Putin’s eyes pop in anger and give a jolt of energy to the opposition movement. But he makes me promise not to disclose any details, fearing what the Kremlin will do to stop him. Kasparov’s press spokesperson slips up and gives a hint while her boss is still in jail in November, saying that since Putin’s legislature won’t pass democratic laws, a united opposition front will pass them instead.

It’s not clear if Putin is even aware of this mysterious plan, but—coincidence or not—a new crackdown seems to be underway with the arrival of winter. Shortly before a major Other Russia protest in Moscow on November 24, a 22-year-old activist is bludgeoned to death near his home. Shortly before, he had called another opposition activist from his mobile phone and reported that he was being followed by secret police. At the protest itself, Kasparov is arrested and held for five days. (“I wouldn’t recommend Russian jails to anyone,” he tells me darkly when I reach him after his release.) Meanwhile, Limonov is the target of a new court order. A criminal case seems to be in the works, alleging that the writer continues to operate the now-banned National Bolsheviks.

I ask Limonov what he thinks the Kremlin’s reaction will be when he goes public with this mysterious and provocative new plan. “I don’t think they’ll be too pleased,” he says, not betraying much emotion. “Maybe they won’t kill me, maybe they’ll just arrest me. Anyway, we’ll find out soon.”

Our story begins late last week when I got a tweet from @AlphaInvictus telling me to go check “who’s sponsoring BuzzFeed today.”

I wasn’t expecting much… After all, BuzzFeed’s known for creating custom posts for advertisers, like the “15 Delicious Things You Can Stuff In A Crescent Roll” post it created for Pillsbury. Weird, yes. Possibly even shady, given how BuzzFeed’s sponsored content looks almost exactly the same as its regular posts. But given the scandal over the Atlantic’s advertorial for Scientology, most sites have become ultra-cautious about allowing controversial sponsors to brand their “content.” How bad could BuzzFeed’s latest sponsor be?

Pretty bad.

Visiting BuzzFeed.com, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The site’s entire “Politics” subsection was plastered with the name of Charles Koch, the world’s scariest billionaire-brother, who runs the biggest private company in America. His name boomed out from every corner. It crowned the top banner and sat prominently atop a column of featured posts, including a link to a page announcing BuzzFeed’s “Special Edition Immigration Summit” — an event proudly “sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute.”

But that wasn’t all! BuzzFeed had also set up an entire customized BuzzFeed page for the Charles Koch Institute. The page featured a fat diagonal banner introducing its sponsor as a place of “Dialogue & Discovery for Societal Well-Being and Progress,” and included Twitter feeds for both the Charles Koch Institute and its Economic Freedom Project. If readers followed the links, they’d be educated about the danger of Big Government and “The Disgusting Consequences of Plastic-Bag Bans”…

It was all a bit too much…so I took a couple of screenshots and tweeted them out:

BuzzFeed took a big bump of pure Koch! Feels good!

The tweet weirded a lot of people out, particularly news media types who, like me, had assumed BuzzFeed was a conduit for cat videos rather than Koch propaganda. Those who clicked further got really freaked. BuzzFeed’simmigration summit, which would be moderated by Editor in Chief Ben Smith, wasn’t just sponsored by the Kochs. It included a host of rabid rightwingers, racists and representatives from a half-dozen Koch-funded corporate frontgroups, including the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation — yep, that’s the same Heritage Foundation that just had to fire one of its immigration experts because he believes that Hispanics have genetically lower IQs than white folks.

“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against,” he said — a premise used by the Heritage Foundation to justify limiting low-IQ Hispanic immigration, while expanding “high-skilled” non-Hispanic immigration quotas.

None of this seemed to worry Smith any. “Immigration is at the center of this year’s policy conversation and we are excited to expand the BuzzFeed Brews series to be a part of it,” he wrote in a BuzzFeed post announcing the event. The post also included a quote from former tobacco lobbyist turned Charles Koch Institute boss, Richard Fink.

Said Fink, “The importance and timeliness of the immigration debate make the need for such thoughtful dialogue imperative. Sponsoring a productive dialogue on this issue is a natural extension of our commitment to advance a free and prosperous society.”

Mr. Fink’s ability to cram his sentences with meaningless PR apparatchik-speak makes it hard to know what the hell he’s talking about. But certainly the man seems to care about society. Indeed, as one of the people who helped Charles Koch pioneer his political and ideological strategies, Fink’s career bears this out. Among his many Koch works, Richard Fink set up Americans for Prosperity and the astroturf outfit that later became FreedomWorks. Yes, that FreedomWorks, the organization that orchestrated the Tea Party Movement. He also sits on the Board of Directors at the Kochs’ Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a deregulation thinktank that helped scrap environmental protections and pushed all sorts of nasty privatization schemes. Yep, Mr. Fink and the Kochs clearly care about society. And that’s exactly that’s why BuzzFeed’s immigration summit was being sponsored by The Charles Koch Institute. It all made perfect sense.

Libertarian mumbo jumbo aside, I wanted to understand more about why BuzzFeed was getting into bed with the Kochs. Was this just the first step in a Koch brothers’ takeover of everyone’s favorite “I Remember The ’90s” site? Is a rebrand as “BuzzKoch” or “KochFeed” on the cards? And where does Ben Smith fit into all of this?

Smith came to BuzzFeed from Politico, where he’d built up a reputation as a connected, credible reporter who reliably delivered scandalous DC insider scoops. BuzzFeed poached him to beef up the site’s news reporting operation and to turn it into a trusted source of news. With him at the helm, BuzzFeed was going to grow out of cat videos and link bait and mature into a sort of Huffington Post for the millennial demographic. And the HuffPost metaphor is not just lazy shorthand for ambition: Buzzfeed’s founder and CEO Jonah Peretti was one of Arianna Huffington’s key lieutenants at HuffPost, and HuffPost co-founder Ken Lerer is now the Chairman of BuzzFeed.

Here’s how a 2012 New York Times profile of BuzzFeed described the anticipated transformation into a serious journalistic enterprise:

[Jonah Peretti] hired Ben Smith, the highly regarded blogger and columnist for Politico, to be his editor in chief. Right after he started in January, Mr. Smith broke the news of Mr. McCain’s endorsement of Mr. Romney for the New Hampshire primary. The message was clear: BuzzFeed was a player in news…

Soon afterward, BuzzFeed raised $15.5 million from Kenneth Lerer’s Lerer Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Hearst Interactive Media, Softbank and RRE Ventures. Mr. Smith immediately began hiring reporters, including Matt Buchanan from Gawker Media; John Herrman from Popular Mechanics; Rosie Gray from The Village Voice, and Doree Shafrir from RollingStone.com. BuzzFeed wasn’t just hiring brand names to serve as lustrous hood ornaments connoting credibility, the way Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington have. The hires at BuzzFeed were more like maypoles: young writers native to the Web who become pivot points for contents because they are bathed in both the ethos and practice of social media.

Aiming to be “a player in news” is a good idea. The question is: How does getting in bed with the Kochs fit into that plan? They are the embodiment of political corruption, and hosting a Koch immigration summit crammed with rabid rightwingers, borderline eugenicists and Milton Friedman groupies seems…odd.

Smith has been curiously silent about the Koch-BuzzFeed partnership, and probably for good reason.

After I sent this news of this to Mark Ames, he reminded me that this isn’t the first time Ben Smith has boosted for the Kochs. In 2011, Ben Smith attacked a report published in The Nation by Ames and Mike Elk that exposed howCitizen United made it perfectly legal for the Kochs to begin politically indoctrinating their employees, telling workers how to vote and warning them that they could lose their jobs as a result of big-government policies. Smith yawned at evidence of Koch indoctrination exposed by Ames and Elk, saying that their “quirky, staid newsletter may not swing a lot of votes.”

I’d never paid close attention to Smith before, but on scanning his record I saw a surprising consistency: every time the Koch cartel comes under serious criticism, every time someone tries to expose another layer of their toxic influence and political corruption, every time a news item threatens their well-guarded racket, Ben Smith is there, calmly and coolly redirecting traffic and reassuring people that everything is okay. His tactic is simple: downplay the importance of the news and deflect attention.

He did exactly that just a few weeks ago in response to the backlash against rumors that the Kochs were thinking of buying the Tribune Company, tweetingout one “could imagine the Kochs being really excellent newspaper proprietors” and then pointing out that David Koch generously pledged to donate $100 million to the New York City Ballet. See, the Kochs aren’t as bad as people say. They care for the arts!

In his role as a palatable, populist defender of the Kochs, Smith has much in common with career Koch apologist David Weigel. If anything, Smith is even more humorless and soulless. In fact, David and Ben frequently join forces to fight for Team Koch.

Here are a few of Buzzbagger Ben’s Koch apology highlights from his tenure at Politico:

Ran damage control for the Kochs after they were profiled by the New Yorker: After the New Yorker ran its devastating profile of the Kochs in 2010, Ben stepped in to personally defend the slighted oligarch-brothers: “…the piece is well worth a read. A couple of caveats: First, I’m not sure it makes sense (nor does Mayer try) to attribute their vast giving solely to practical business motive. Underwriting the early blogging of Dave Weigel, for instance, was probably not the single most efficient way to neuter the EPA.” I’m not sure about David Weigel, but President George W. Bush’s White House outsourced management of the EPA to the Koch’s Mercatus Center. That’s a pretty efficient way to neuter it, if you ask me. Two days later, Ben was at it again, defending the Kochs from the evil journalists at the New Yorker by promotinga new reputation-management website for Koch Industries called KochFacts.com. The website, Ben helpfully explained, “offers point-by-point rebuttals to the New Yorker piece”… Thanks for the tip, Ben!

Koch PR circle-jerk: In March 2011, Ben published a post headlined “Labor Harmony at Koch Company” that was like a Zucker brothers satire of East Germany, reprinting a “We love our boss” letter from a Steelworkers Union tool. KochFacts.com later used Ben’s post in a letter they wrote to the New York Times about all the happy unionized employees who work for Koch Industries, citing as proof “a March 2011 piece in Politico” — by Ben Smith.

Kochs don’t spend nearly as much money on political campaigns as liberals would have you believe: While most Americans were probably shocked by the Koch oligarchs’ announcement that they expected to amass $200 million to spend on the 2012 presidential elections, Ben was more concerned with playing the role of hyper-anal copyeditor policing investigative journalism. Ben, along with David Weigel, took the New Yorker to taskalleging that they’d falsley claimed the Kochs brothers planned on “spending” $200 million on the presidential campaign, when technically, the Kochs only “plan to steer cash.” “This is true,” tweeted Ben, retweeting Weigel’s “KochFacts has a point here,” linking to a KochFacts.com PR statement titled “Holding The New Yorker Magazine Accountable.”

Says critics of the Kochs are conspiracy nuts: To Ben Smith, anyone who points out the massive influence the Kochs wield over the GOP is a delusional conspiracy theorist. This “unified Koch theory” doesn’t make any sense, says Ben, because the Kochs also fund Democratic campaigns: “Kochs gave $196,000 to Democrats in 2010 cycle.” That’s a whole lot of money! What Ben didn’t mention was that the Kochs spent over $2 million on Republican candidates — a ratio of 10 to 1. Or the millions spent on GOP think-tank mills.

Ben Smith promoted Charles Koch’s political essays: Buzzbagger Ben promoted an essay by Charles Koch, in which the billionaire discusses his favorite President, Calvin Coolidge. He told Politico readers to check out “a brief essay by Charles Koch on the Depression, crystallizing the version of that era that’s become current in some conservative circles: Hoover did too much, FDR way too much, and Coolidge was just right.” Fact is, Coolidge was one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, largely because his pro-business policies helped destroy the American economy and brought on the Great Depression. Koch Industries tweeted out Ben’s article: “@Koch_Industries: Check out @BenPolitico and his link to Charles Koch’s column about best US Presidents.” Buzzbagger Ben quickly retweeted the Koch Industries’ tweet. It was Koch RT heaven!

Attacked ThinkProgress blogger Lee Fang’s work on Koch brothers:In a profile piece on ThinkProgress, Buzzbagger Ben criticized former ThinkProgress blogger Lee Fang for saying the Koch brothers are active in politics motivated by a “desire to boost their profits.” Ben alleged that Fang is practically the only “liberal” who believes that the Kochs’ political philanthropy is cynically intended to boost their wealth and power, and dismisses Fang’s piece as “an argument even some liberals reject as an overly simplistic caricature.” Who are these “some liberals” cited by Ben? Turns out, it’s our very own buddy Glenn Greenwald! Incidentally, Greenwald admitted he was paid $4,000 per hour [prorated] to speak at the Koch’s Cato Institute. As it turns out, Greenwald basically agrees with Ben Smith about the Kochs’ influence being overhyped writing: “in the scheme of corporate and oligarchical dominance, the Koch Brothers are a small part of that dynamic.”

Ben Smith alleges Jews forgave the Kochs for illegally doing business with Iran: Ben Smith ran cover for Koch Industries after the company was busted for illegally doing business with Iran. He wrote, “heavyweight pro-Israel group AIPAC is defending Koch Industries after a report that a Koch subsidiary did business in Iran until 2007 in spite of U.S. efforts to isolate the Islamic Republic.” Hey, and if the Israelis can forgive the Kochs for selling millions of dollars of oil equipment to Iran, a country they think wants to wipe them off the map…Well, America should move on, too. Forgive and forget. This is a Christian nation, after all.

Defended Scott Walker after Wisconsin’s rightwing governor fell for David Koch prank call: Writing in Politico, Buzzbagger Ben acted as if the prank call was no big deal at all. In fact, Ben seemed downright bored by the whole thing. He argued that the only thing the prank “proves is that Walker doesn’t actually know Koch.” That’s right, Ben. Why would Gov. Walker know the Koch brothers? After all, they were among the biggest backers of his campaign. And politicians never meet their biggest campaign contributors. David Koch even admitted: ”We’re helping him, as we should.” So David Koch knows Gov. Walker. But why would Walker know David Koch?

Defended Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Scalia against charges of conflict of interest: In 2011, Ben dismissed the allegation that the views of Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Scalia on Citizens Unitedcould have been swayed by the multiple financial conflicts of interest the Justices had with the Koch family. What kind of conflicts of interest? Well, among other things, Clarence Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose that his wife took in $680,000 from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation. Speaking of judges and the conflicts of interest, Ben Smith’s father, who calls himself a Hayekian Judge, was nominated to highest court in the State of New York amid serious controversy over campaign donations.

Of course, Ben Smith’s shilling isn’t restricted to the Kochs. He’s a Movement guy — and he’s there wherever there’s money and PR demand for his service.

Case-in-point: While at Politico, Ben Smith became widely seen in the news media world as a press flak for Michelle Rhee and her astroturf school privatization outfit StudentsFirst. A USA Today report said it straight up: “reporter Ben Smith, who has close ties with Rhee…” When Rhee’s first teaching scandal broke, Ben ran Rhee’s PR statement as a news item. He then blamed Rhee’s increasingly toxic image on an underhanded campaign waged by teachers unions, making no mention the real reason people were turning against Rhee: the fact that her “reform” agenda depended on widespread cheating and deception with children’s scores. Not surprisingly, Rhee’s StudentsFirst blogged Ben’s article as evidence of a union smear campaign against Rhee: “Ben Smith of Politico finds only one voice behind the attack on Michelle Rhee’s record in D.C. — the union.”

That’s the kind of PR defense racket Ben Smith was running under everyone’s nose at Politico, and it appears that he’s been setting up the same sort of operation at his new BuzzFeed home.

For instance, on March 12, the same day Ben tweeted out that he thought the Kochs would make “really excellent newspaper proprietors,” Buzzfeed’s Los Angeles bureau reporter Tessa Stuart published a story seemingly confirming Ben Smith’s hunch. Stuart observes that everyone is worried the Kochs will swallow up the Tribune Company into their existing thinktank-industrial complex and turn it into gigantic business propaganda machine, but she reassures her readers that the Kochs would never interfere with editorial decisions.

How does she know? Well, she asked Koch Industries’ slightly manic PR flak, Melissa Cohlmia. The article read like sloppy version of a press release. Stuart had no hard questions for the Kochs’ PR rep and took her word that the Kochs “promised that — if there is a deal — Koch would respect the outlets’ independence.” You can trust Stuart’s judgment. After all, she is the same BuzzFeed reporter who baselessly smeared Michael Moore, accusing him of lying about helping the Oscar-nominated Palestinian filmmaker who was detained at the LAX airport on his way to the Oscars ceremony. She demanded Moore provide evidence of the detention.

The signs of the baggerfication of BuzzFeed are many and multiplying fast.

Consider Ben Smith’s recent hire of Benny Johnson as BuzzFeed’s D.C. editor. Benny Johnson, who likes to wear bow ties and looks like a cross between George Will and Peewee Herman, was previously employed by Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and the rightwing media watchdog Accuracy In Media. Benny hit all the usual bagger points, calling President Obama a “committed statist,” as well as “an absolutely avowed statist” and described healthcare reform as totalitarian takeover — it’s all “gaining government control over our private lives.” Benny (who used to go by “Ben”) also produced a tribute video to Andrew Brietbart called “Breitbart Memorial: Man Against The Mob,” featuring slow-mo shots of Brietbart rollerskating in Palm Springs.

At BuzzFeed, Ben Smith has put Benny to work creating PR listicles promoting guns and Republicans blowing shit up — it’s the bagger equivalent of cute cat videos. Here’s one of my favorite Benny posts in which he boosts the NRA, the tobacco industry and the sugar lobby all in one short post:

Sarah Palin Packs Chew, Threatens To Start Dipping On NRA Stage ”Sarah Palin whipped out a can of chew during her speech at the NRA convention. … She started packing it like a champ while saying ‘Don’t make me do it.’ . . . The action was in response to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announcing he will be seeking a ban on displaying tobacco in stores in NYC.”

From apologizing for the Kochs to overseeing cute cat videos for baggers — you’ve come a long way, Buzzbagger Ben…

This article was originally published in The eXile on September 17, 2004

Exile editor Mark Ames exposes a rare fawning side while interviewing his lyrical hero, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, while Smith, who is notorious for abusing journalists (even reportedly putting a cigarette out in the eyeball of one Brit journo), reveals a charming, disarming side. Particularly in the number of times he addresses Ames by his first name, giving the interview a kind of Paintwork/Dale Carnegie sensibility.

In preparation for this weekend’s back-to-back Fall concerts, Ames phoned Smith up at a recording studio in Manchester, where the Fall are laying down new tracks. A woman with a French accent answered the phone — perhaps MES’s beau. She was very particular about getting Ames’ first and last name. We pick up from the moment Smith takes the phone…

Smith: Hello.

Ames: Yeah, is this Mark?

Smith: Yeah.

Ames: Thanks for taking my call. So you guys are in the studio right now?

Smith: Yeah, we just finished recording all morning.

[Line goes dead]

Ames: Ah shit.

[Dials, Smith answers]

Ames: Hi, this is Mark again. Sorry about that. KGB cut us off. Happens a lot.

Smith: Ha-ha! Is that it?

Ames: So you guys are working on a new album?

Smith: Well Mark, it’s actually like between-album songs, you know. Not a new album, just some between-album songs that we’re doing.

Ames: I heard a new song you guys did recently on BBC called “Clasp Your Hands” I think. It kind of sounded to me more like a Grotesque or Slates-era song.

Smith: Yeah, it does sound like Grotesque, doesn’t it? I was thinking the same thing.

Ames: Was that intentional or did it just turn out that way?

Smith: No Mark, it wasn’t intentional you know, it’s just how the song was done. My new bass player wrote it, they’re all much younger than I am.

Ames: How do you like your new lineup? How do they compare to previous ones?

Smith: Well I think this band’s the best one yet.

Ames: Do you think the sound of this lineup is going back to the old sort of…

Smith: We’re not trying to, you know. I don’t ever go back and listen to the old Fall albums. I don’t like listening to stuff I’ve already done, unless I have to if we’re doing an old song in our set.

Ames: Raw, lo-fi rockabilly always seemed to be one of your biggest influences.

Smith: Yeah, yeah, that’s right, Mark.

Ames: How did you find your new band, or they find you?

Smith: I don’t know, through contacts and stuff. I don’t like hiring Fall fans, you know what I mean? Don’t want people coming to me. I prefer if they don’t even really know The Fall.

Ames: You’re very prolific. I was wondering if you ever had a crash after a hard working period of a few years and you just can’t do anything.

Smith: Well I haven’t had a vacation in five years, you know!

Ames: Jesus… (Laughs uneasily)

Smith: I really don’t understand these bands that take time off, like a year off, after their albums. I like to keep working, you know. Cuz after I put out an album, if I’m just sitting around for a couple of months I get bored, you know? You turn on the radio and it’s just nothing but crap, these awful bands and all the awful music, you know. So I have to go back in and make some new songs.

Ames: You’ve always said that the world needs The Fall. Is that still the case?

Smith: No Mark, I don’t think the Chechens care about the Fall (laughs). Anyway, we had terrorism here all my life, you know, with the IRA. I don’t even think about it, you know.

Ames: You once said “Serial killers have always been a bore in my books.” What about terrorists, do you think they’re boring too? [Line cut off] Hello? Fuck…

[Ames calls back]

Smith: Hallo.

Ames: I guess the KGB doesn’t like all this terrorism talk.

Smith: Ha-ha! Yeah, seems that way. You were talking about this Matt Damon, right? What a [unintelligible]… I can’t believe he won’t come out. Ha-ha! Incredible. I think I know who you’re talking about now, that actor.

Ames: He’s afraid to come to Moscow. I hope all the Russians boycott his movie here.

Smith: Yeah! They should boycott it. He deserves it.

Ames: The name “The Fall” came from the Camus novel, and Camus was influenced by the Russian writers, like Dostoeyevskii.

Smith: Yeah, that’s right Mark, Camus was influenced by the Russians.

Ames: Did you ever go through a Russophilia stage yourself, with their writers or artists?

Smith: Yeah, still am a Russophile, still going through it.

Ames: Who?

Smith: I like Gogol, still read him.

Ames: What is it about Gogol that you like?

Smith: I don’t know Mark, he’s just so surreal and comical. I mean this story about the nose coming to life, you know, really great. There’s something about his stories.

Ames: It’s strange that he seemed to come out of nowhere. There was almost no Russian literature before Gogol and then he came out of nowhere to write these stories that seem so modern and disturbing.

Smith: Yeah, exactly. He’s really good, isn’t he.

Ames: So what are you expecting when you come out here? Do you have any expectations?

Smith: I was in New York twice in the last three months, you know. And uh, I met a lot of Russians there. There’re more Russians in New York than Americans, you know?

Ames: Yeah, Russians are tough, for Europeans. So you won’t be doing any tourism stuff?

Smith: No Mark, I never do that wherever we go.

Ames: You’ve been to Eastern Europe?

Smith: Yeah, we played Vilnius and Prague.

Ames: How did you like it out there?

Smith: I don’t know, they were all over us, the Czechs, you know what I mean? I didn’t really, uh, see what the big fuss was. I mean all these English people are saying, ‘Isn’t Prague great,’ you know, but there wasn’t much there. Just…

Ames: Yeah, I lived there briefly and hated it.

Smith: Ha-ha! You too? That’s what I thought. It’s full of stupid college students, you know. They all think they’re part of something. I couldn’t stand the place. Nothing there at all.

Ames: People think somehow if you go there it gives you literary status and then you can write your memoir about it.

Smith: That’s what it is, isn’t it Mark. It’s like they all think it’s something they’ve got to do, isn’t it?

Ames: You guys have influenced pretty much every band in the last 20 years that people now consider important. Does that piss you off that so many bands have ripped you off? Do you want to sue them or something?

Smith: Naw, it doesn’t piss me off. I just hate it when they use my name, you know? I don’t like it when I see “The Fall” used by all these bands as their influence, you know what I mean? But it doesn’t piss me off that they ripped us off, no.

Ames: Well do you find it flattering?

Smith: No I don’t find it flattering, not at all. Because they’re all such crap, you know. I just wish they would stop using our name. I hate opening a magazine and seeing my name in some article about a crap band.

Ames: Like Pavement. I got genuinely angry the first time I heard Pavement.

Smith: Yeah, so did I. My label was really angry, they wanted to do something about it.

Ames: And Sonic Youth too. Although at least they mixed their own sound with yours.

Smith: Yeah, they’re not as bad as Pavement in that way. I don’t like any of it really, Mark.

Ames: What bands do you like? Are there any bands you’re listening to these days?

Smith: Yeah, there’s this band Mouse on Mars from Germany, I heard them a few months ago. They’re really good, I like them a lot. And I’ve been listening to a lot of reggae lately.

Ames: Yeah? Some of your songs have a reggae beat, like Kurious Oranj.

Smith: Yeah, right, it is kind of reggae.

Ames: Will your band do a kind of reggae-rockabilly sound on your new stuff?

Smith: Well the band members like that sound. They’re a whole generation younger than I am, you know, and they’re really into the reggae and old rockabilly. So that’s the sound in some of our songs, yeah.

Ames: Do you think that’s because old rockabilly is sort of the least bullshit sound after all the trends?

Smith: I think that’s right, yeah.

Ames: Are your new bandmates influencing you as well?

Smith: Yeah, I think so. I mean the bass player was like four years old when The Fall started, you know. (laughs). None of them were big fans of The Fall, so they’re not trying to reproduce it, you know. I don’t even think they liked The Fall that much when they joined. Ha-ha!

Ames: Yeah, you don’t want them to fawn all over you, you want them to push you.

Smith: That’s right, Mark. Keeps it more surprising.

Ames: You once said you try to limit the amount of information you take in otherwise it can scramble your brain. Do you still live by that?

Smith: Yeah, you don’t want to get too influenced by things, you know. Most of the new music is just crap anyway. You just get distracted. We always try to do something different, you know. Like “White Lightening.” I don’t know if you’ve heard that song?

Ames: Oh yeah! In fact when we first started this newspaper, that song became a kind of production day theme song in our office. The Russians we worked with loved it.

Smith: Really? Ha, good!

This article was originally published in The eXile on September 17, 2004

FRESNO, CA — By the time you finish this column you will be able to destroy huge buildings, kill hundreds of people in a few minutes, and strike terror into your enemies. And all you need is stuff that I guarantee you already have around the house.

Sound too good to be true? Well, hold on to your hard-ons, because there’s more! This weapon is so impossible to trace that well-trained terrorists all over the world use it to clean up evidence after an operation.

When you realize its potential, you’ll wonder why more irregular armies aren’t using it already. If you’re me, you’ll wonder why you haven’t done it yourself.

I got the idea watching Malibu burn. Oh, man, that was the best day off I’ve had in years. Regular porn doesn’t do much for me, but those clips of “heartbroken house owners” sobbing—man, I was just about creaming in my expand-o-waist black slacks. And talk about guilt-free porn! There’s no downside to watching movie producers’ mansions turn into toxic smoke. Don’t tell me I’m the only Inland Californian who laughed his head off at those follow-up pictures of the Prez hugging teary-eyed billionaires. They all looked like my bank manager. I can’t think of anybody whose houses I’d like to see burned up more, and I wouldn’t mind if their precious purse dogs happened to get forgotten in the big BMW bug-out once the flames made it past those “This Property Protected by….oooh owww hot!” signs. Those properties were protected by zip, nada, a whole lotta nuthin’. You can’t scare a fire, you can’t shoot it. The Mongols and Wehrmacht combined would have to run from a good ol’ SoCal brushfire. That’s a weapon, baby.

And there’s Bush streaking cross-continent on Air Force One to hug the “victims,” with his aides hissing into the ear unit: “Psst! Do ‘compassion’! Squirt some tears, dammit!”

Some websites are already saying what went through my head the second I saw those flames: somebody got smart and stopped playing with bombs and went back to basics, back to what works. Mighta been al Quaeda, but might just as well have been some nut who got fired for not showering because God told him not to. Lotta what they call “agendas” out there. Lotta Bic lighters too. Which means about half the population of this nuthouse qualifies as a suspect.

That’s the beauty of fire: anybody can do it. Actually that’s just one of about a dozen advantages that arson has over bombs. Let’s run ‘em down, info-mercial style, Bomb vs. Arson:

Bomb: very tricky to make; easy to score an “own goal” (blow yourself up learning the trade); requires a detonator, very tightly controlled—”not sold at any store” as they say on those sad Oldies Compilation ads; requires electrical expertise, the one thing even most handyman types can’t handle; leaves traces on bomber’s hands, clothes and car; often fails to work; takes a truckload of fertilizer to bring down big buildings; can’t spread beyond immediate target area.

In an infomercial, this is where Christie Brinkley pops up to say, “Gosh Chuck, that sounds way too complicated for me! Isn’t there an easier way for me to lay waste to an enemy city with no risk or obligation?”

And the MC, some unemployed alkie who used to be on Days of Our Lives, says, “There sure is, Christie! Just look at all the advantages you get with our Arson package:

Fire: so easy a caveman, or Douglas Feith, can start one

*So easy to make a little kid can do it. In fact, they do, all the time. Mommy’s Bic plus Daddy’s La-Z-boy equals no more house and BBQ baby. Oldest story in the world. Ever see a toddler make an effective pipe bomb? (Pipe bombs are the worst weapons in the world anyway. The only thing they’re good for is quick amputation of the pipe bomber’s hands and eyes—Nature’s way of saying, “thy genes ye shall not pass on!”)

*Unless you’re one of those toddlers, you won’t get killed by your own arson. Not that hard to walk away from a brushfire—when it’s just getting started. Later, not so easy. But that’s the whole point. In other words, very safe for the arsonist.

*No detonator needed. In fact, no tricky electronics whatsoever. So easy a caveman could do it, and did.

*No traceable chemicals. What are they gonna say if they ever get lucky enough to identify you, “Hey, the suspect has handled gasoline! And a lighter!” Until they start taking smokers off jury lists, and they might in this fucked-up state, no jury on the planet’s going to convict you for handling a 98 cent Bic lighter. And as for gasoline, imagine the interrogation: “We found gas all over your hands, firebug!” “Uh, I used the self-serve and it spilled.” Long awkward silence, ending with you walking out into the daylight, smiling in quiet pride at that big black smoke column over Malibu.

*Unlike bombs, a fire can’t fail to go off. It doesn’t take an Edison to make sure your fire is working. You could send the dumbest guy on the planet to carry out the mission—and according to Tommy Franks, the dumbest guy on the planet is ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith—and he’d get it right.

“Mr. Undersecretary, do you have ignition?”

Feith: “Uh…wha’?”

“Mr. Undersecretary, is the brush now burning?”

Feith: “Oh yeah, hee hee… Pretty fire!”

“Excellent, Mr. Undersecretary, now please vacate the area.”

Feith: “uh?”

“Get in the car and go, ya moron!”

It would in fact be Feith’s first successful mission. That’s fire for ya: a real morale-builder, a real resume-packer.*And I’ve saved the best for last: fire is what the pros call a “force multiplier.” Meaning it goes on and on an on, long after that Energizer bunny is fricasee’d in the ashes, a gourmet treat for any coyote willing to get its paws burnt.

Unlike bombs, the size of the fire you set has no relation to its effect. You take a Bic and apply it to some dry weeds upwind of Malibu at the end of the dry season, and that two-inch flame ends up forcing some producer to reschedule his next pool party and restock his cocaine stash. (I bet that “toxic smoke” they warned about in LA was more than toxic, bet it was a real freebase reek.)

A fire that takes one second to start can burn a city five miles away, down to the ground. That makes fire way more effective than most nukes. And a lot easier to make.

Irregular warfare’s Agent Orange

The real question is why it isn’t used more often. Of course we have fire weapons like napalm, flamethrowers, and incendiary bombs, but all of them require hi-tech conventional weapons. And for the foreseeable future, conventional warfare ain’t shit. Until otherwise notified, we’re talking irregular warfare, the only kind that matters.

The Japanese tried sending fire balloons over the Western US in WW II, but that was sheer stupidity. The vector for fire is humans. You use people to start fires. And people, like I keep telling you over and over, are the only essential weapon for an irregular force. In this case, that means one clean-cut Al Qaeda sympathizer who’s learned to smile all the time, keep a job, avoid talking about politics and drive a neutral-looking car (my pick would be a Honda, nothing more boring or invisible than an Accord). There he is standing on a hill inland of Malibu. He’s been mowing his lawn, watching the NBA, blending in like a fanatic, and now that the Santa Ana’s blowing toward the prime real estate on the ocean, he’s ready. He takes a casual glance up and down the road, tosses a little sterno stove into the brush, drives on. Three days later Tori Spelling collects ten million for her beachfront mansion.

Now, in the interests of disclosure and transparency and all that good shit, I should mention that I’m sort of an accused arsonist myself. You may remember that my old friend Victor “-y” Davis Hanson took a few minutes off from his usual dayjob—sucking Cheney’s dick—in order to accuse me of trying to burn down his vineyards. As if. As if I’d work up a sweat lugging gascans into some dusty farm. I’m more the morale-building, inspirational type. I encourage people to find the inner arsonist trapped inside themselves; I don’t go out and wobble my flab doing torch jobs personally.

But Vic must be in love with me or something, because he won’t drop the grape-torching business. He’s written about it at least twice since he first dropped that dime on me in the pages of National Review. And there’s a lesson in that. What it shows is how the neocon mind works. First, they never ever admit they’re wrong–but we all knew that already. The more interesting lesson is how, even though they talk big, they think so small. So lame.

Because if I was going to do a burn on my pal Vic—which I’m not planning to, but if I was—it wouldn’t be some ridiculous, pointless try at burning his grape vines, especially when the poor fool wrote a whole book proving vines don’t burn too well.

No, Vic, I don’t think like that. I think like a real irregular. If I wanted to introduce you to the possibilities of fire as a weapon I’d just attend one of those lectures you give to tell nervous old GOPers that Iraq is going swell, just swell. (Can’t believe the bastard gets paid to do that. Most of the people I know spend their lives lying for nothing.)

I wouldn’t even need a ticket in. Just a 55-gallon drum, a dolly to wheel it up to the entrance, an air conditioner repair guy’s overalls (size XXL, but then most air conditioner repair guys are XXL) and a couple of bike locks, with chains. I’d wait till all those gullible hicks had filed in to the hall, and I’d wait for the applause when VD took the podium. Then I’d tilt up the dolly and get to work, singing something in character—maybe “Ring of Fire”—you can’t go wrong with the Man in Black. First I’d padlock all the emergency exits, then I’d pour all 55 gallons into the lecture hall. The drum would be labeled “cleaning solution” and it’d be truth in advertising, because nothing cleans out a crowded lecture hall faster than burning gasoline. No sprinkler system in the world can handle that volume, and if the gas don’t kill ‘em, the stampede when they see the first flames will.

What I like to imagine is Victor up there passing the optimistic word to the very end. As the flames try to get his attention, he’ll be using all that mental discipline he used since the invasion to deny there’s even a problem, “…aside from some lingering embers in a few provinces of the lecture hall, this fire is completely contained.” By this time the hall will be totally black with smoke, but Vic is a gamer and he’ll drop his favorite history bomb on anybody still alive: “Things looked black in 1864, too, you know! And what about the Battle of the—cough, ack!—Bulge? Iwo Jima? The Pusan…the Pusan…” Just about that time Vic’s mighty voice would be silenced for good because his larynx would be even blacker than 1864 and Pusan put together, blacker than a forgotten In-N-Out burger that’s sat all day on the flame broiler while the rookie cooks got high in the employee toilet…

And please don’t tell me this kind of atrocity would “backfire” on the firebug. Hiroshima, Dresden, Tokyo—some pretty big BBQs, and they didn’t backfire on anyone. We’re just talking about the lo-tech irregular-warfare versions of that, and to a serious guerrilla, there are no illegitimate targets. Everything is up for burning. And don’t tell me this kind of “brutality” doesn’t work, either. Let me tell you about the Cinema Rex. Ever see a movie there? I bet you didn’t, because for one thing it was in Abadan, the big oil-refining island off Iran. And for another thing, some of Khomeini’s holy warriors burned down the Cinema Rex just before the Old Man himself came back to Iran and booted the Shah.

See, the Rex had a special feature for kiddies: every Friday after school was out, all the foreign oil-workers’ children would pile into the Rex to watch cartoons. Even a Muslim couldn’t object to that, right?

Wrong. There is very little that a real Khomeini-ite can’t object to, and for them the idea of kids watching movies on a Friday was so horrible that it just naturally called for one of the Faithful to walk around the Rex that Friday afternoon padlocking all the doors, then pouring a couple five-gallon cans of gasoline under the doors and in the windows, and then setting it on fire. Hundreds of children dead.

I’ve never forgotten that story. Made me so sick, as if Carter’s disgusting puss-out wasn’t already nearly killing me, young as I was.

But nobody else remembers it. Did you? Betcha didn’t. Betcha never heard of it. And the Iranians weren’t bothered at all. A few weeks later, hordes of the stupid fucks swarmed over Tehran to welcome the glorious Imam Khomeini. And a few years after that, hordes of kids not much older than the ones that got crisped in Abadan ran through machine gun fire or volunteered to be human mine detonators for Iranian human-wave attacks across the Shatt al-Arab a few miles from Abadan.

Last week, I wrote about the nation’s first successful “parent trigger” privatization of a public school, in a isolated town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. In that piece, I mentioned how parents and teachers had become disillusioned by the biased reporting of parent trigger in the media.

“No matter what article I read, it seemed to me that the common perspective that was shared was pro-Parent Revolution,” said La Nita M. Dominique, the local Adelanto president of the state teachers union, referring to the outside pro-charter front group that descended on their community and used harassment, deception and thinly veiled threats of deportation to push parents into signing a petition that handed over their kids’ school to a private contractor.

Lori Yuan, a mother of two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission, described feeling that she was caught in some kind of grand conspiracy that was bigger and more powerful than anything she could imagine.

“I would do these interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers. Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this information out because people need to know this. And then I’d get the article and I’d be like this has nothing to fucking do with what I said. I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? [D]o they own the newspapers?”

It’s easy to paint this as the paranoia of parents who feel like the media doesn’t understand their concern about parent trigger. That was my first impulse too. And then I started reading some of the coverage.

It didn’t matter if it was Fox News, NPR, the Washington Post, LA Weekly or the local right-wing newspaper: coverage of parent trigger issues would invariably have the same pro-privatization bias, even down to their use of the same stock phrases about “parent empowerment” and the need give parents the ability to “reform” a system that protects lazy public school teachers and their sleazy their union cronies.

All very strange — until you start connecting the dots between the financial backers of pro-parent trigger groups like Parent Revolution and the media industry.

As I wrote in my earlier piece, Rupert Murdoch has announced his plans for expansion into private education (“When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”) The Financial Times and The Economist are both owned, or part owned, by Pearson, which has huge interests in education and educational publishing.

Some media organizations would barely survive without their educational arms. The parent company of The Washington Post, for example (which also owns Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine and other media properties) relied on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, for 62% of its revenue in 2012.

In these cynical times you might not be surprised to learn that News Corp, The Washington Post Company and Pearson are hugely conflicted in their education coverage.

But then there’s NPR.

What’s not just surprising, but actually shocking, is how far pro-school privatization interests have been able to infiltrate and corrupt the reporting at supposedly left-leaning NPR, and its affiliate public radio stations.

Consider a new NPR local news project called State Impact, which NPR describes as a “local-national collaboration between NPR and station groups in eight states that reports on state government actions and their impact on citizens and communities.”

In January, State Impact published an interview with Greg Harris, the Ohio director of Michele Rhee’s pro-charter school astroturf group StudentsFirst to promote a “report card” that the group released rating Ohio’s state education policies.

State Impact reporter Ida Lieszkovszky had nothing but praise for StudentsFirst, describing it as “a group looking to improve education through increased accountability for teachers and principals, more financial transparency in schools, and enhanced power for parents, is grading states on their education initiatives.”

StudentsFirst gave Ohio a C-, largely because the state did not “evaluate”—aka fire—teachers based on “performance” and limited the number of total charter schools that could be opened. In fact, StudentsFirst gave most states Ds or lower for not firing unionized teachers, for not being nearly pro-charter enough and for not scrapping their “outdated pension systems.” (California got an F, while NSFWCORP’s home state of Nevada got a straight D.)

Lieszkovszky took StudentFirst’s discredited pro-charter blather at face value, and was even nice enough to embed the full report card at the bottom of the article. She also fed the StudentsFirst rep anti-union questions during the interview…stuff like this:

Q: Some of the measures that you mentioned, like tying teacher pay to teacher performance, are things that the teachers’ unions in the state really don’t like. How much of this has to do with unionization in these states?

The interview also included a link to a NPR State Impact profile page for Michele Rhee that reads like it was crafted by Rhee’s publicist, describing her as a crusading reformer trying to “build a national movement to defend the interests of children in public education.” The profile makes no mention of the controversy surrounding Michele Rhee’s reform tactics, which have been discredited in a series of test-score cheating scandals.

NPR might describe State Impact’s coverage of StudentsFirst as “news reporting” but at times it feel closer to outright shilling.

So, why would public radio be so willing to gush about groups like StudentsFirst and their pro-privatization agenda?

Well… it might have something to do with the fact that both NPR’s State Impact and Rhee’s StudentsFirst are funded by the same pro-privatization groups. In this case, the Walton Family Foundation, which has been funneling over $100 million a year to various right-wing efforts to break teachers unions and privatize public education—and that includes both NPR and StudentsFirst.

In 2012, the foundation gave Rhee’s StudentsFirst $2 million. That same year, it cut NPR a hefty check cut NPR a hefty check for $1.4 million. The foundation classified both handouts—one to a respected news organization; the other to a notorious astroturf outfit—as “K-12 Education Reform Grants” to “Shape Public Policy.” Among other grantees funded under this category include the the ultra-libertarian Institute for Justice and the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation, both Koch-connected outfits involved in the nasty business of busting unions.

How much of the Waltons’ $1.4 million NPR grant went specifically to fund the State Impact project is not entirely clear, but State Impact does list the Walton Family Foundation as a major donor on a “Supporters” page, hidden several clicks away from the program’s homepage.

Looking through NPR’s recent education coverage, it becomes clear very quickly that this glaring conflict-of-interest is not one-off event or an accidental editorial misstep.

In fact, pro-charter school bias and undisclosed conflicts-of-interest run rampant through NPR’s education reporting. Take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the past decade, it has funneled around $8.5 million to National Public Radio and its affiliate stations and networks, according to data compiled by the Seattle Times. And a good chunk of that money was specifically earmarked for “improving” NPR’s education reporting.

For example: In 2009, the foundation gave National Public Radio a grant of $750,000 to “support coverage of education issues on NPR programs, including the ‘Morning Edition’ and ‘All Things Considered’.” That same year, it sent another $651,768 to Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media to “strengthen the quality and quantity of reporting” on education issues. American Public Media produces NPR’s Marketplace programming, which has also come under the corrupting influence of Wall Street and pro-austerity interests. (Read our previous reporting on that issue here, here, and here.)

A combined total of nearly $3 million from Gates and the Waltons? That’s a whole lot of money just for education coverage — and all of it’s coming from two of the biggest backers of the push to privatize public education.

As recent investigation by Dissent magazine found that private philanthropies spend a combined $4 billion a year to hand public K-12 education to the private sector. The Gates and Walton foundations sit at the top of the food chain, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropic gifts to increase their leverage over a sector that’s worth up to $1 trillion a year.

In 2011, the New York Times reported on the incredible scope of Gates’ funding of education issues.

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005… “It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said he received no financing from the foundation.

And sure enough, hosts and reporters of those NPR programs routinely struggled to cover charter schools, parent trigger campaigns and pro-charter outfits funded by Bill Gates and the Walton family in a positive light, all while keeping readers and listeners in the dark about the NPR’s financial conflict of interest.

The program described Parent Revolution in generally positive terms and gave a lot of air time to Ben Austin, the Beverly Hills political operative who runs the group and helped push the parent trigger law through California’s legislature in 2010. It also aired the unsubstantiated rumors spread by Parent Revolution that the nefarious teachers’ union threatened undocumented immigrants were with deportation if they signed Parent Revolution’s trigger petition. (As I revealed in my “Pulling the Trigger” piece, the exact opposite was true: Parent Revolution was offering to help fix the immigration problems of undocumented parents in return for their support of the parent trigger campaign.)

In the end, NPR conceded that Parent Revolution’s campaign was “incredibly disruptive” to the community, but concluded that it was a step in the right positive direction:

“Still, giving parents the right to take over a failing school is a powerful idea. With the financial backing of influential groups like the Gates, Broad and Walton Foundations, the parent trigger is expected to spread beyond Adelanto.”

And, while the program identified the Gates and Walton foundations as funding Parent Revolution and the parent trigger movement (the two foundations gave a combined $7.8 million to Parent Revolution from 2009 to 2012), NPR didn’t see fit to tell listeners that Walton and Gates were also major funders of their own education coverage.

But this wasn’t NPR’s first mention of Parent Revolution and Adelanto. Two months earlier, in September 2012, it had broadcast another parent trigger conflict-of-interest fluff job: a segment on Talk of the Nation called “Parent-Trigger Laws: A Bold Plan To Save Schools.”

For nearly 15 minutes, host Neal Conan promoted “Don’t Back Down,” an “issues” movie in which indie superstar Maggie Gyllenhaal uses the parent trigger law to fight back lazy school teachers and their corrupt union bosses. Conan then used the film (which was produced by right-wing billionaire and school privatization supporter Phillip Anschutz) to describe a real life parent trigger campaign that was being waged by Parent Revolution in the desert town of Adelanto.

Here’s Conan introducing the segment:

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis star as a fed-up parent-teacher combo who mobilized to take on the bureaucrats and the union. . . . The story is fiction, but the theme and controversy the film taps into are very real. Several states have passed what are known as parent-trigger laws, which give parents a pass to make changes in failing school: a new curriculum, longer school days, different personnel. They can even take over, entirely, and turn it into a charter school.”

Cavanagh praised parent trigger “reform” law, and described Adelanto’s parent trigger campaign as having wide parent support: “I can’t think of many issues where it’s easy to get, you know, 51 percent of parents at a school behind – behind any effort.”

And this is where NPR’s coverage got real sleazy.

See, not only was NPR’s Conan doing a fluff piece on a corporate front group bankrolled by two of the radio network’s major funders, without disclosing this conflict-of-interest to readers. But Cavanagh, the sole expert invited onto the program to talk about these issues, was also being paid out of the same bucket, and he wasn’t saying anything about it either.

In 2011, the Gates Foundation gave Education Week a $2 million grant to support coverage “focusing on the education industry and innovation in K-12 education.” The foundation gave the Education Week an additional $5.2 million from 2005 to 2009 to create “special reports on education”

Among other duties, Cavanagh runs Education Week’s “Charters & Choice” blog. A few days ago, that blog boosted a study published by Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice that supposedly shows how school vouchers and other school privatization schemes “can help boost the academic performance of students making use of those programs.” As it turns out, Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which was founded by Milton Friedman and his wife Rose in the mid-90s, is also funded by the Waltons. Their foundation gave the outfit a combined $1.02 million from 2011 to 2012.

So not surprisingly, talking to Conen on NPR, Cavanagh had nothing but kind words to say about Parent Revolution:

That’s right. That’s right. Parent Revolution has been helping the parents from the very beginning. Their director is Ben Austin, who’s actually a former Clinton administration, White House official. And they’ve been very active in trying to help the parents carry this movement forward. At the same time, you know, they make the argument, look, this is a parent-led effort, and we are going to do what the parents at Desert Trails Elementary want.

Let’s go through that again: here we have a NPR program in which everything—the host, the interviewee and the subject being discussed—are all funded by the same pro-privatization outfits. And disclosures? Not a single one.

I am one of 100,000 Chechens in Moscow. There are another 30,000 Ingush living here. Together, we belong to the “Vainakh” ethnolinguistic group and make up roughly one per cent of Moscow’s population.

Yet very few Muscovites have any idea what we look like, or what makes us different from other “chernozhopye” (“black-asses,” a pejorative used by Russians when referring to peoples from the Northern and Southern Caucasus, as well as those from Central Asia).

With a total population of 1.5 million, Vainakhs form one percent of Russia’s total population of 145 million, and so would seem a natural presence in the capital. Still, a lot of people think, “What the fuck are they doing here! Let them go back to their Chechnya and die under our bombs!”

Who is that average, one-in-a-hundred Vainakh lurking among you, and how can you spot him or her? I will help you answer that question. Because it’s important that you should be able to spot in a crowd the very species that’s survived a grinding 15-year war.

The truth is there is no average when we talk about Chechens. Not that I mean each Chechen is so unique, or that the very word “average” grates on our ears. It’s just that Chechens are, well, “different.” Different from each other and different from you. And long live different. Fuck average.

In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when the level of persecution and harassment against Vainakhs was particularly high, many Vainakhs living in Moscow and other Russian cities did their best not to look Vainakh – to blend in. They wore “futsinsky” clothing (from the word “futsin,” meaning innocent and stupid weakling), practiced the difficult-to-imitate gait of a typical botanik, (“walks like botanik,” meaning a guy who has an unassertive, non-proud and non-aggressive walk and stance – what you call a “twerp”), purchased fake prescription glasses, and did a lot of other things to fool the militsia’s Vainakh-radar. And you know what? They soon gave up. It almost never worked against Petrovka 38′s operatives, who knew their Vainakhs well. The reason was simple: Chechen pride always remained in their eyes, in their expressions, and in their every move.

I remember being stopped once in a bank in the center of Moscow in 1997 by a group of six police operatives. I’m fair-complexioned; at the time I had a Belarusian passport; and I speak Russian without an accent. They took a quick look at me and my passport, asked a couple of questions, and were about to leave me alone when one operative, who was clearly the most experienced with Chechens, almost screamed, “Guys, don’t let him go! Let’s bring him to Petrovka and study him and his docs well! I’ve got a hunch that he is a Chechen – look in his eyes! Look in his cold insolent eyes! It’s a purely Chechen type of expression!”

Unfortunately for him, I was too hard a target. I shouted back in my special “nachalnichesky” (big boss) deep-voiced bass-tone, which I use on special occasions like these. “Are you fucking crazy!? I will turn your lives into misery, idiots!” And they slinked off.

But that taught me a good lesson. We are very easy to spot, indeed. One just needs to grasp the profound pride in our eyes, because we cannot get rid of it, not like we can change our clothing or the way we walk. We can’t hide, not even behind fake prescription glasses.

This pride is present in the way we walk and in the way we talk, especially in the way we look; but mostly in the way we live and understand the universe. This makes us a nation and this holds us together.

Ours is not a haughty pride, not the pride of a medieval Spanish Baron. It’s the pride of a free man, of one who has earned that pride and is continuing to earn it. And every generation of our ancestors has done so by their blood and sweat. It’s not easy to describe, but once you spot and study the outward manifestations of Chechen pride, you will be able to spot us without doing headcounts or asking for passports. It’s the kind of pride that only dies with its bearer. It’s not paraded about arrogantly, but you always feel it. It’s totally different from the display of pride you find in peoples from other southern nations, including the Caucasus. The Vainakhs’ pride is cold, not boastful and full of vanity. It’s not for show; it’s kept inside.

What are we proud of? Chechens are one of the most culturally self-sufficient nations in the world. Some may get closer to other peoples’ cultures and even enjoy it, but the complex Chechen system of moral codes doesn’t really allow for any alien ideas and values. The Chechen perception of the world is dominated by a philosophical category of beauty known as hozal. Everything we do is judged according to this standard. If you record even a very casual conversation between Vainakhs (any Vainakhs) in their language, do a word-for-word translation, and put it on paper, you will be shocked at the number of words which have “beauty” as the root-word. Being morally subdued or broken is the ugliest thing a Vainakh can think of. And pride in oneself is the most beautiful thing that any Vainakh can ever achieve.

Think you can spot a Vainakh? Take this photo. This whole crew shown above is made up of Chechens. But do they look like they all belong to the same tiny ethnic group? That’s where your vigilance is required. As my babushka would say: “Nothing worth doing is easy in this world!” Or as a Chechen saying goes: “It’s a hard work to be a Vainakh.” So if it’s hard work to be a Chechen, why should it be easy for you to be able to recognize one?

These crafty Chechen females are camouflaging themselves as innocent graduating students from a Russian vocational school. Even the one at the far end would easily pass for, let’s say, an Armenian. But they are all Chechens, believe me. Scared yet?

And this Chechen girl? If you were a Moscow metro policeman, would you approach her and demand to see her passport? I always say that the best investment in security is through public education.

How about this guy? If you were a Russian skinheads or soccer hooligan, would you attack him with metal pipes from behind? No, you’d walk right past him, totally ignorant that you’d just missed a good opportunity.

How to tell these Chechen gopniki apart from other black-assed gopniks?

The body language and the expression can be different, depending on background and education but pride exudes from every Vainakh, as it exudes from these two masons from rural Chechnya.

I am pretty sure that you would suspect this group of guys. But how do you really know that they are Chechens, and not, let’s say, Georgians, or Armenians?